Hacking Frequent Flyer Programs (video) | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Frequent Flyer Programs (video)

anarchogeek.com

36 pointsrabble11 comments

I remember when 'flybuys' first came out in Australia they had neglected to handle cases where goods were returned. Trampoline sales (and returns) went through the roof!

Flying to Thailand and spending an entire week taking $18 flights back and forth between two cities seems like a pretty incredible cost to pay for First Class seats for a year.

I suppose if I was a consultant and flew every week, I might feel differently, but I was pretty surprised at how much (in non monetary units) you have to pay to get "cheap" upgrades.

I watched a documentary about this, and the guy that discovered this deal employed 8 or 10 locals to fly this route for 8-10 hours a day. He then got a call from the ATO, or some department similar because that was a common drug route, and the agent interrogating him asked him to set him up with it too!

You can get frequent flyer points even if you're not the one in the seat? I always thought that points weren't transferrable.

I've been looking in to this recently and the point he makes about flying crazy routes to get extra miles is a little off. It may work for some airlines, but I know for others you earn miles for how far your start and end points are apart from each other, not how long your route actually was.

So if you're flying Los Angeles to Seattle, but have a layover in Miami, you would only earn the miles that someone flying Los Angeles to Seattle would.

Interesting, but this isn't true for any of the major US carriers (e.g, UA/CO, AA, DL), so I don't think it undermines his presentation.

Cool - this is exactly what we're working on over at mileagebrain.com.

It is a system, and it can be hacked - I figured it quite likely that the hacker crowd would be interested in this (like I am).

And, once hacked, the airlines will plug the hole you're exploiting and there goes (part of) your business model.

Is building a business on a loophole that can easily be plugged wise?

Anyone know what kind of credit score ding one would take for opening and canceling cards (as suggested in the video)?

Credit scoring is relative and the magnitude for which most actions affect different people can vary significantly. However, directionally speaking, you may see a negative effect on your score from "churning" cards due to the following:

1) Lowering your average age of accounts. All else equal, if you have 2 credit cards open, one that you've had for 8 years and one that you've had for 6 years, the average age would obviously be 7. If you proceed to open a dozen airline cards in one year (regardless of whether you close them or not), your average age would plummet and could negatively impact your score.

2) Each time you apply for credit or a loan, a "hard inquiry" shows up on your credit report and can negatively impact your score. The scoring system is designed to account for multiple inquiries in a short period of time to allow people to shop around for a mortgage or auto loan by grouping them as one inquiry (as long as they are done in a 30-45 day period). This is not the case for credit or store card applications.

3) In addition to simply applying for credit, having numerous recently open accounts and newly available credit is also perceived as a risk and can lower your score.

The above being said, you may or may not experience a significant hit on your score through "churning." Don't assume that because someone else did it without any negative impacts that the same will be true for you. If you will be applying for a mortgage in the near future, I would advise against it. For everyone else, YMMV.

Most folks who churn already have a mortgage or some don't care about maintaining a really high credit score. I was mostly talking about what you can do, what people do, not what you maybe should do.

American Airlines and Citicards right now will give you between 75,000 and 100,000 miles for opening a new card. That's a free round trip business class ticket to europe/asia/south america. $10,000 in flights for opening a card.

Mostly people churn to try and get life time status, it's how people get status without BIS, Butt In Seat miles flown.

I personally get status mostly by flying crazy routes, Uruguay to South Africa via New York and London. I also focus on purchasing tickets which will earn me maximum miles, but for flights i'd fly anyway.

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