February 14, 2025
Worst frequent flier habit: Mileage run

[ad_1]

Imagine taking a flight that you don’t want or need to stretch your legs at the destination airport before heading straight back.

Jerry (a pseudonym), who works in software sales, estimates that these types of flights make up about 15% of all his flights. On some Saturdays, he’ll make an instant round trip from LA to the other side of the country. To compensate for all the sitting, he’ll take a short walk around the airport before boarding the return flight.

For them, halving their weekend is worth it because of the benefits they get from higher airline status: upgrades, lounge access, and partner privileges.

For years, frequent flyers like Jerry have been taking mileage runs—sometimes called segment runs or tier points runs—just to maximize the airline points or reward status they’ve earned. On message boards and social media, they trade specific details of flight routes, airline promotions and reward levels, calculating the exact itineraries that will get them to a certain position or keep them there.

For mileage runners, it can be a sport, a competition, a hobby, a passion, and possibly even a source of community with other extreme commuters. It’s not a secret at all.

Yet past news coverage has portrayed it as a bizarre but essentially harmless practice, or even offered readers tips on how to optimize such travel. The consequences of climate change are rarely mentioned.

These results are now more clearly evident than ever. Several climate records have been broken in 2023, including the warmest July ever and the lowest level of sea ice in Antarctica. Wildfires and heatwaves have scorched the planet.

In 2022, aviation was to be responsible for 2% of CO2 emissions from energy use. This may sound low, but per-passenger emissions are very high and very uneven, given that only a small minority of people actually fly that much.

In 2018, 11% of the world’s population flew, while 4% flew internationally. Only 1% of the most frequent flyers are responsible for more than half of the emissions from commercial aviation. Popular culture and social media in wealthy countries can make it seem like everyone is flying all the time. But this “hyper-aeromobility”, as one scholar has called it, essentially only reduces to 1%.

It is the wider impact of these frequent flyers that climate campaigners and experts, including the UK Climate Change Committee, are targeting with calls for frequent flyer levies as well as frequent flyer programs being banned. Under such proposals, most people and even most commuters would be unaffected.

In addition to these two measures, UK climate nonprofit Possible has urged an end to the sale of private jets and advertising for flights. Its flagship aviation campaign has been for a frequent flyer levy, a progressive tax that applies for every second flight a person takes in a year, and increases as flights increase. This type of fee has strong public support in the UK.

Alethea Warrington, senior aviation campaigner for Possible, sees this as a practical and fair policy. “You can get a significant reduction in demand by targeting only frequent flyers,” she explains. “You don’t need to tell people they can’t take their annual family vacation. You don’t need to tell people that they can’t travel overseas to be with their families every once in a while.”

Tear point runes represent its opposite: uncontrolled and unnecessary flight. Warrington comments, “From a climate perspective, this is an enormous amount of emissions for a very small number of people and is not doing any good. You know, people literally flying around to have access to their lounges or whatever. It sucks unbelievably.”

A recent report published by Possible, titled Pointless: The Climate Impact of Frequent Flyer Status, notes that overall, frequent flyer programs encourage more carbon emissions by rewarding travelers disproportionately more for long, complex flights. These are the flights that some tier point runners follow especially because they come in different distance bands, and offer more prizes. One itinerary recommended in frequent flyer forums is the exhausting-sounding Malaga-Helsinki-London-New York-Los Angeles-San Francisco trip.

One commenter pointed out that it took seven trips in a single week at a cost of $1,500 to get 75,000 points and a profit of four pounds.

For his part, Jerry isn’t particularly concerned about climate impacts, although he used to buy carbon offsets for mileage run. “Planes will fly with or without me, full or not,” he argues. My additional fuel expense as a passenger is less in the overall picture of the flight.

This is a common climate myth. Airlines are responsive to customer demand, so flight choice encourages more flights.

It is tempting to reject any sort of behavioral change because most air travelers do not consider themselves responsible for the emissions associated with that flight. A certain amount of cognitive dissonance is at work, as it can be hard for frequent travelers to reconcile the environmentally destructive nature of an activity that brings them so much satisfaction and status. One way to reduce stress is by sticking to the myths about flying.

The status, in the form of both the tangible rewards and the intangible cash one gets from being an elite jet-setter, would be hard to give up. But for Warrington, one interesting aspect of adopting this lifestyle is how unpleasant it can seem.

She thinks, “It sounds like an exceptionally joyless experience.” When a community of level runners exchanges stories of navigating through airports, getting on planes and worrying about the health effects, “it’s interesting how little they seem to enjoy it.”

People clearly enjoy the benefits that make flying more bearable. Vikas (a pseudonym), mentions specific benefits such as “a greater chance of upgrading to first class which makes travel more convenient.” However, he admits that when it comes to his frequent flyer status, “part of it is on my mind as well.” He feels compelled to hit a goal.

Vikas, who worked for a tech firm before being laid off a few months ago, flies around 40,000 miles per year. He took a round-trip flight between Everett, Washington, and San Francisco for the quality of higher award status, where he says he earns four times as many points for the same mileage.

However, he views the transatlantic mileage run as opportunistic and wasteful of sales promotion, which he has seen other regular travelers doing.

Possible has an online tool that people can use to send a message to British Airways and Virgin Atlantic asking them to end their frequent flyer program. For the time being, it appears that airlines will not cut down on loyalty programs, which may be the most profitable part of their operations. In addition to the money paid for flights, points collected by loyal customers are valuable currency, which airlines sell to banks.

Virgin Atlantic acknowledged the importance of its loyalty program, saying in a statement that customer service is “the main reason our customers fly Virgin Atlantic. Flying Club is our loyalty program designed to reward those who rewards those who fly with us when they travel, not based on their flight frequency. According to a spokesperson, most of these points are “earned on the ground through our credit cards.” When When customers use their points to fly with Virgin Atlantic, they are doing so on one of Atlantic’s most fuel-efficient fleets and a leading airline on decarbonizing aviation.

British Airways has expressed no desire to move away from its loyalty scheme. A statement from the airline read in part, “We recognize the loyalty of our customers by offering tangible benefits as part of our Executive Club program. We recognize the need to balance this with our environmental commitments.

Like the UK government’s “Jet Zero” plan ridiculed by environmentalists, those corporate environmental commitments focus on technological solutions – such as sustainable aviation fuel and hydrogen-powered aircraft – that can reduce flight emissions quickly enough. or will not mature with sufficient potential. , Energy-efficiency measures in commercial flight are not enough to offset the increased demand.

Finnair will change its loyalty program in 2024, like British Airways, switching to a points-based system that rewards total spending based on the number of flights. A statement from Finnair alluded to a less demanding role without actually committing to it: “We need to be able to reduce the CO2 footprint of flying. Engaging customers in this work is one part of the toolkit we need to use – this includes encouraging customers to combine flying with other modes of transport and encouraging customers to pack light when traveling to do is included.

These statements sidestep the fact that encouraging flight, let alone rewarding excessive flight, is not compatible with climate reality. For starters, airlines can identify this by taking a close look at their frequent flyer programs.

[ad_2]

Leave a Reply