THE ULTIMATE BUSINESS CLASS MILEAGE RUN | 92,000 Miles Flown in 2 Weeks!

in this video I'm going to tell you about the craziest two weeks of my entire life this is a story of when I lived in airports and on airplanes for two weeks straight ninety two thousand miles flown a hundred and seventy five hours on airplanes 150 hours in airports fifteen business class flights fourteen airport lounges three countries two nights wandering the streets of Hong Kong one crazy adventure so at summer of 2015 we're about to start traveling full time in 2016 so I'm in like full-blown travel hacking mode trying to figure out how we can earn the maximum amount of frequent flyer miles when I come across this crazy deal so I'm at work and Nate calls me he is so pumped up about this crazy deal he's throwing out all these numbers and miles and status and countries and I really did not understand what he was talking about but he promised me that I would benefit if I allowed him to leave me for two weeks get on an airplane and fly around the world for two weeks this is truth trust so I said yes but this is nice adventure so I'm gonna let him take it from here [Music] [Music] so after I got off the phone with Tara I proceeded to book three business class flights that were round-trip from Sao Paulo Brazil to Hong Kong for $700 apiece now these fights should have costs probably around $5,000 but it was a mistake there so moving forward to understand the story better you need to understand two terms and that's mistake fares and mileage runs a mistake there is essentially when an airline sells a ticket way too cheap on accident and that's exactly what was happening right here now a mileage run is when you fly from one destination to another with no intention of actually like going and enjoying that destination instead you're flying the trip just to earn the frequent flyer miles so fast-forward to October 2015 I'm about to leave for my mileage run and at this point Karen I have bought a camera and we have two idea that maybe we'll like record some of our travels so this is my first attempt at essentially vlogging and obviously you didn't go too well because I'm sitting here explaining the story to you instead of just you watching the video it's actually a little painful for me to go back and watch because I feel like it's really embarrassing but I just wanted to tell you this because this is why I have a camera on this trip and this is where all the video clips are coming from now Kara's calling me before we Hey hi you're on speakerphone during my first video diary I was they have done a very good job so far so the mileage run actually started in South Paulo Brazil I live in Tennessee so first I had to book a flight from Nashville to Sao Paolo using 30,000 90 miles so this entire trip actually started me flying from Nashville to South Paulo and this is where the mileage run itself actually begins I think in order to be able to follow along with this light complicated crazy two weeks the easiest way to do that is going to be to break it up into three sections and that's going to be the three round-trip flights that I flew between South Paolo and Hong Kong so my exact route of what I'm going to call part one is this starting in Sao Paulo upload nine hours to Dallas in 16 hours to Hong Kong in three hours to Bangkok then six hours to Tokyo then sixteen hours back to Dallas and nine hours back to south Allah and that was part one of three and just to give you some perspective on how much flying that is the flight from Dallas to Hong Kong is 16 hours which makes it the 12th longest commercial flight in the world all right I just got to Brazil this means I'm done with the first leg of my mileage run I think it took somewhere around 72 hours to complete the first leg so from here I've been to Bangkok and back and it's about 9:30 in the morning here so I'm going to go find the lounge and grab a cappuccino also I've spent I bet I've walked three miles on these little moving escalator things these things should be installed everywhere at this point some of you have probably started to feel sorry for me for spending that much time on airplanes well let me tell you it actually wasn't that bad I was really enjoying myself so every single one of these flights is in business class I had a full lay flat seat when I got on the plane I could watch as many movies as I wanted to they were serving me three-course meals and then when I got to the airport I was going into the lounges and eating more free food actually the biggest problem with his entire trip was just how cool I got from eating so much good food I'm currently on my way to this to get a free massage a shower and breakfast [Music] this is my third deal [Music] so at this point I'm six days into the trip and all I've done is fly around the airplanes and go in a bunch of different airports probably the most interesting thing that happened during the first part of the trip was that I stayed up all night in the Bangkok Airport so I decided that I was going to try to keep my body on Central Time so that meant that anytime I got to Asia I had to stay up all night all right so I got the Bangkok about two hours ago and I came into Laos I could get in with the priority pass and when I walked in and they told me that I could only stay for two hours luckily they told me there six other priority task lounges than the airport so basically what that means is for the next six hours have to hop to three different lounges okay also part two and we're gonna start with the itinerary I flew eight hours from Sao Paulo to Miami then I had a short flight from Miami to Dallas then another 16-hour flight from Dallas to Hong Kong then after layover in Hong Kong appaluse sixteen hours back to Dallas and then another nine hours back to Sao Paulo so during part two of the trip it was my first time leaving the airport so it's day eight I land in Hong Kong it like 6 p.m. and my next flight doesn't leave till 1 p.m. the next day so I have a ton of time but it's like all during the night but again I'm not sleeping so I'm plane is just to like go out in the Hong Kong and experience as much as possible all right I just emerged from the subway and this is the first time that I had been outside an airport or an airplane in seven days [Music] this place looks awesome symbols everywhere and I can't understand him to think keep in mind at this point Karen I really haven't done very much traveling this is one of my first major international cities to be exploring and by the time I actually get into the city it's already dark so the first thing I do is I go try to find this place called the temple street night market [Music] so after that I went to find some food and I wanted to eat something foreign and I remember seeing these ladies on the side of the street cooking like a bunch of weird things on sticks and for some reason I was feeling really adventurous even though I was going to be spending like the next week on an airplane I don't know while it's feeling so of interest but I bought these squid legs that were cooked in some weird liquid and they were just like it was one of the worst things I've ever had [Music] here we go about the try squid octopus thing on a stick I really like that it's really hard not about to taste your cartilage kind of white the hard part here here that's not really bone that's about what texture [Music] I paid less for the dollar for this now I'm not a cognition but being laughed at but Chinese ladies to cook this food for me such as another bite to be polite all right Irish mill Hong Kong not a corner so that was like one of my first crazy for food experiences and it was not very good next I read about how beautiful the hong kong harbour was so I made my way down to the harbour [Music] now at this point it's like 2 a.m. this was the first time that I learned that people sleep in McDonald's in a lot of Asian countries like there were I thought they were homeless people but it turns out they were like businessmen just sleeping in the dog I feel super ashamed to admit where I'm at right now because this is the first time that I've ever done this have been in another country it's about 2 o'clock in the morning and I'm at McDonald's I came for the Wi-Fi I promise not to eat McDonald's I just got a Coke and so I used to walk by to figure out where the flower market is that opens or sorry not the flower market the fruit market let's figure out where it is consider person 3 and that's not next stop so I go down to the fruit market and it was just absolute chaos pretty intense try not to get ran over of all of the cart running around food almonds this is actually just Street and I'm in so nicely this is actually just the streets outside of the free market that I was scared to walk through the fruit market with this camera because I might get run over thanks for a while [Music] so the subway station opened back up at 6:00 a.m. and when it did I jumped all the subways to go to Lantau Island which is where this huge Buddha statue sits up on a hill and when I got there it ended up being closed until 10:00 a.m. so I made a very poor decision to wait until 10:00 now ran up like hundreds of stairs to see this huge Buddha statue and I thought I was going to get this beautiful view of Hong Kong turns out it doesn't even actually face Hong Kong so I didn't get the view and I had to rush back to the airport to catch my flight at 1:00 p.m. then I was like so close to missing I would have screwed up the rest of the trip but thankfully I made the flight I flew from Hong Kong back to Sao Paulo to complete leg 2 of the trip one of the things that I forgot to tell you is probably the biggest reason that I went on this entire trip was the executive platinum status with American Airlines executive platinum is American Airlines top-tier status that offers a ton of bonuses so I originally calculated that it was going to take me three round-trip flights from Sao Paulo to Hong Kong to earn his negative Platinum status but when I got back to South Paulo after part two I checked my American Airlines account and to my surprise I had earned American Airlines that they could Platinum status already I didn't take into account the business class bonuses or the bonuses that I would get from earning status so at this point I basically could have gone home but I had one more round trip flight from Sao Paulo it all gone so this brings us to part three actually one more thing before we move forward to part three when I got nice to Sao Paulo actually had a 36 hour layover and at this point I was planning on going out into the city and staying at a hostel for the night but when I got stamped out and I was about to leave the airport this customs guard pulled me aside into this little room and was asking me like what my plans were where I was going and he basically advised me not to leave the airport and go out into the city so it seems silly now with all the travelling we've done but basically he scared me enough that I decided not to leave the airport I went that's the lady that had standing into the country I just pretty much begged her to let back in the airport which thankfully she did so this was how one night that I actually spent on the ground as opposed to in an airplane it was by far my most uncomfortable night because I slept in a lounge on two chairs that were pulled together I would have much rather than sleeping on the airplane all 15 nights all right it's about 1:30 in the morning here in the South Paulo Airport the lounge oh that just closed but I'm told that there's a 24-hour lounge in terminal 2 so I'm making my way in that direction then walking for about 20 minutes and haven't seen a single person and this part of the airport is a lot older and sketchier than the international terminal okay now for real part three for part three I flew another nine hours from Sao Paulo to Dallas then another 16 hours from Dallas to Hong Kong then from Hong Kong back to Dallas for another 16 hours and then from Dallas back to Sao Paulo for nine more hours so the highlight of part three of the trip was visiting my first first-class lounge at this point I earned executive platinum status so when I got to Hong Kong I was able to enter the wing first-class lounge and if you've been watching our videos you know how much care and I love first class lounges and you've actually seen this one several times on the blog but this was my first time visiting a first-class lounge it was just like my mind was blown there was a free sit down restaurant with sushi that had the crazy Cabana thing like I said you've already seen it but it was just like I had no clue good stuff like this existed in airports so by far the highlight of part three just picked up my boarding pass at two hours here in the Hong Kong Airport and I received my first ever lounge invitation let me show it to you [Music] [Music] Oh [Music] and this is insane I'm in the cafe Pacific first-class lounge and this is what they call a Cabana it's crazy it has a bathtub shower a sink in it huge so this pretty much brings us to the end of the mileage run after going to the first-class lounge in Hong Kong I returned back to Sao Paulo and then flew from Sao Paulo back to Nashville so I've been gone for a total of 15 night and spent 14 of those sleeping on airplanes so at this point you're probably wondering what were the benefits that I got from this crazy mileage run and for flying around the world for two weeks straight I'm going to attempt to explain them activity so after all this flying are in three hundred and thirteen thousand American airline miles which I've valued at one point five cents apiece so basically I earn four thousand six hundred and ninety five dollars worth of American airline miles but to get the true value you have to take out the amount of money that I've spent on the flight so four hundred ninety five thousand - two thousand one hundred equals two thousand five hundred and ninety five dollars worth of free flights so that's the value in frequent flyer miles that I earn from doing this mileage run in addition to the frequent flyer miles I earn I also earn the executive platinum status now to earn executive platinum status you have to fly a hundred thousand miles on American Airlines and when you earn executive platinum status these are the benefits that you get priority boarding free upgrades access to first class lounges and free award flight changes now we were able to use all of these benefits to our advantage during our first full year of travel it was really nice being able to get on the planes first we definitely use the first-class lounge access to its fullest and you'll know that if you've been watching our videos and also the award flight changes were huge for us because we get booked and award with points and then if our schedule change we could change that award flight free of charge so now the big question was this worth it yes one hundred and like ten percent yes I would do it again in a heartbeat I think even if I would have earned the frequent flyer miles and the status I had so much fun doing it that I probably would have just paid for it and I would do it again in a heartbeat but this time I would carrot with me because she was pretty jealous by the time I got back so this brings us to the end this crazy mileage run Karen I've spent like hours trying to figure out how to take two weeks worth of like craziness and put it into one concise story so hopefully I didn't completely lose you this is a video to care and I've been meaning to shoot for a really long time it's just been such a big thing to boil down into one video we've just been putting it off and putting it off so I'm so glad that it's finally getting out to you we didn't shoot this video for the purpose of promoting what I'm about to promote but it seems like a good time so I have actually created an e-book that will teach you how to find and book mistakes bears called the mistakes fair manual and I'll link that down below and I've also recently watched a full travel hacking course and if you buy the travel hacking course then you get the mistake fair ebook for free so both of those are linked down below if you do want to check those out if not I really hope you enjoyed this crazy story what Oh [Music] not eating there and apparently I'm the only one who was connecting to another international flight there was one really interesting thing in this batter I've always heard about a fancy toilet in Japan and check this out yes that is a today and I may or may not have try to no community they have dryers I'm making wireless Calgary I am off the pond the ladies market which i think is the ladies who sell things and we're not ladies being sold if it is the latter I will run quickly [Music]

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 316,420

Rating: 4.8803887 out of 5

Keywords: mileage run, travel hacking, frequent flyer miles, american airlines, business class, airport lounge, airport lounges, avgeek, aviation, airplane, travel, tourist, kara and nate, error fare, mistake fare, executive platinum status, cathay pacific, japan airlines, jal, the points guy, the wing first class lounge, business class lounge, american airlines business class, hong kong, hkg, sao paulo, gru, dfw, centurion lounge, airline status

Id: U1pk2FJBhcg

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017