Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
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Ben Schlapping
Ben Schlappig is a master of flying around the world — at no cost to himself. Bryan Derballa
Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
Last year, a young man walked into the Seattle airport and took the next flight to anywhere — and he hasn't come down since
By Ben Wofford July 20, 2015
The boarding procedure has barely started at Chicago O'Hare, and Ben Schlappig has already taken over the first-class cabin. Inside Cathay Pacific Flight 807 bound for Hong Kong, he's passing out a couple of hundred dollars' worth of designer chocolates to a small swarm of giggling flight attendants. The six suites in this leather-bound playpen of faux mahogany and fresh-cut flowers comprise the inner sanctum of commercial flight that few ever witness. They're mostly empty now, save for two men in their twenties who seem even giddier than the flight attendants. The two stand to greet him. "This is so cool!" exclaims one, and soon Schlappig is ordering champagne for everyone.
This sort of thing happens to Schlappig nearly everywhere he goes. On this trip, his fans will witness Schlappig's latest mission: a weekend jaunt that will slingshoot him across East Asia — Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tokyo — and back to New York, in 69 hours. He'll rarely leave the airports, and when he does he'll rest his head only in luxury hotels. With wide ears, Buddy Holly glasses and a shock of strawberry-blond hair, Schlappig resembles Ralphie from A Christmas Story if he'd grown up to become a J. Crew model. Back beyond the curtain in business class, a dozen jowly faces cast a stony gaze on the crescendos of laughter and spilled champagne — another spoiled trust-fund kid, they've judged, living off his parents' largesse. But Schlappig has a job. This is his job.
Schlappig, 25, is one of the biggest stars among an elite group of obsessive flyers whose mission is to outwit the airlines. They're self-styled competitors with a singular objective: fly for free, as much as they can, without getting caught. In the past 20 years, the Internet has drawn together this strange band of savants with an odd mix of skills: the digital talent of a code writer, a lawyer's love affair with fine print, and a passion for airline bureaucracy. It's a whirring hive mind of IT whizzes, stats majors, aviation nerds and everyone else you knew who skipped the prom.
Schlappig owes his small slice of fame to his blog "One Mile at a Time," a diary of a young man living the life of the world's most implausible airline ad. Posting as often as six times a day, he metes out meticulous counsel on the art of travel hacking — known in this world as the Hobby. It's not simply how-to tips that draw his fans, it's the vicarious thrill of Schlappig's nonstop-luxury life — one recent flight with a personal shower and butler service, or the time Schlappig was chauffeured across a tarmac in a Porsche. But his fans aren't just travel readers — they're gamers, and Schlappig is teaching them how to win.
"I'm very fortunate in that I do what I love," says Schlappig, stretching out in an ergonomic armchair as we reach 30,000 feet and just before the mushroom consommé arrives. In the past year, since ditching the Seattle apartment he shared with his ex-boyfriend, he's flown more than 400,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe 16 times. It's been 43 exhausting weeks since he slept in a bed that wasn't in a hotel, and he spends an average of six hours daily in the sky. He has a freewheeling itinerary, often planning his next destination upon hitting the airport. Just last week, he rocketed through Dallas, Dubai, Oman, Barcelona and Frankfurt. Yet for all his travel, it would be a mistake to call Schlappig a nomad. The moment that he whiffs the airless ambience of a pressurized cabin, he's home.
"An airplane is my bedroom," he says, stretching to reach his complimentary slippers. "It's my office, and it's my playroom." The privilege of reclining in this personal suite costs around $15,000. Schlappig typically makes this trip when he's bored on the weekend. He pays for it like he pays for everything: with a sliver of his gargantuan cache of frequent-flyer miles that grows only bigger by the day. Hong Kong, he says, is his favorite hub, and "the only city I could ever live in." The 16-hour trip has become so routine that it's begun to feel like a pajama-clad blur of champagne and caviar — or, in Schlappig's terminology, a "two-hangover flight."
As the sun descends over the polar circle, a recumbent Schlappig loses himself in a 2 Broke Girls marathon playing on a free-standing flatscreen. "The fact is, we are beating the airlines at their own game," he said last year at a gathering of the Hobby's top talent. "The people who run these programs are idiots." Then he paused. "And we'll always be one step ahead of them."
Schlappig wasn't so much introduced to his fixation as he was raised by it. Born in New York, he became obsessed with airplanes as a small child, endlessly reciting aircraft models and issuing flight announcements from the back of his parents' car. "Benjamin was always different than my two other boys," says his mom, Barbara. "Teachers told me, 'He's ahead of everything.' He was bored."
Around age 13, he discovered the website FlyerTalk, a massive free-for-all forum of all things airline, where users meet to strategize over deals, test for cracks in the bureaucracy and share the spoils. There, Schlappig found a global community playing a massively complex game set upon three basic components.
One of the fundamental steps a Hobbyist can take is choosing an airline to compete for top-tier loyalty status; Schlappig chose United. Nothing was free up front — the object of the game was a return on investment. A Hobbyist doesn't spend unless he can get the same or greater value in return. It took Schlappig about a year to master the dozens of convoluted techniques, exploiting mistakes in ticketing algorithms and learning the ins and outs of the frequent-flyer programs airlines had created after deregulation in the late 1970s. The second leg of the game is credit cards — collecting and canceling as many as possible, and deploying a series of tricks to reap the reward points that bank-and-airline-card partnerships would virtually give away. As he delved deeper, Schlappig learned about a third level, a closely guarded practice called Manufacture Spend, where Hobbyists harness the power of the multitudes of credit cards in their pockets. Airline-affiliated credit cards award points for every dollar spent, so over the decades, Hobbyists manipulated the system by putting purchases on credit cards without ultimately spending anything at all. At its simplest, this included purchasing dollar coins from the U.S. Mint with a credit card and immediately using them to pay off the charge. Schlappig read one detailed post after another that insisted Manufacture Spend was the only true way to fly for free — like sliding a coin into a slot machine and yanking it back with clear string.
Eventually, the best way he learned to visualize this bureaucratic gamesmanship was to see it as a series of table games on a sprawling casino floor — and if the airlines were the house, Schlappig realized, the Hobbyists were the card-counters.
Exceptionally bright and equally motivated, Schlappig saw a way of convincing his parents: by showing them how they could visit family in Germany paying less in first class than flying economy. From there, his parents grew to fully indulge his obsession. By the time he was 15, they were delivering him to the airport on Saturdays and retrieving him Sunday nights at baggage claim. "It was an interesting hobby," says his dad, Arno, as cicadas chirp outside the St. Petersburg, Florida, condo their son bought them after the blog took off. "I said, 'Hey! Keep it up. It's better than smoking pot.' " On a typical weekend, Schlappig would hopscotch to the West Coast and back — Tampa, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., never exiting the airports. "Some of his friends knew," Arno says. "The teachers I don't think were aware of it."
Despite his high IQ, Schlappig was an apathetic student. He attended an all-boys Catholic school, where he struggled to fit in. "When his homework was done, he went back to his room on FlyerTalk," Arno recalls. "And he just posted and posted." Hobbyists say the game takes years to master. But at 16, Schlappig became the first known member to fly across the Pacific Ocean six times in one trip — Chicago, Osaka, San Francisco, Seoul and back again — in July 2006. By his 17th birthday, he'd logged half a million miles. That year, Schlappig was elected to FlyerTalk's governing TalkBoard; in 2009, he ascended to vice president, second to Gary Leff, now 40, one of the Hobby's most popular bloggers. (Schlappig calls Leff "the Godfather" of the Hobby; the two e-mail each other daily.)
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Ben Schlapping
Ben Schlappig is a master of flying around the world — at no cost to himself. Bryan Derballa
Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
Last year, a young man walked into the Seattle airport and took the next flight to anywhere — and he hasn't come down since
By Ben Wofford July 20, 2015
The boarding procedure has barely started at Chicago O'Hare, and Ben Schlappig has already taken over the first-class cabin. Inside Cathay Pacific Flight 807 bound for Hong Kong, he's passing out a couple of hundred dollars' worth of designer chocolates to a small swarm of giggling flight attendants. The six suites in this leather-bound playpen of faux mahogany and fresh-cut flowers comprise the inner sanctum of commercial flight that few ever witness. They're mostly empty now, save for two men in their twenties who seem even giddier than the flight attendants. The two stand to greet him. "This is so cool!" exclaims one, and soon Schlappig is ordering champagne for everyone.
This sort of thing happens to Schlappig nearly everywhere he goes. On this trip, his fans will witness Schlappig's latest mission: a weekend jaunt that will slingshoot him across East Asia — Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tokyo — and back to New York, in 69 hours. He'll rarely leave the airports, and when he does he'll rest his head only in luxury hotels. With wide ears, Buddy Holly glasses and a shock of strawberry-blond hair, Schlappig resembles Ralphie from A Christmas Story if he'd grown up to become a J. Crew model. Back beyond the curtain in business class, a dozen jowly faces cast a stony gaze on the crescendos of laughter and spilled champagne — another spoiled trust-fund kid, they've judged, living off his parents' largesse. But Schlappig has a job. This is his job.
Schlappig, 25, is one of the biggest stars among an elite group of obsessive flyers whose mission is to outwit the airlines. They're self-styled competitors with a singular objective: fly for free, as much as they can, without getting caught. In the past 20 years, the Internet has drawn together this strange band of savants with an odd mix of skills: the digital talent of a code writer, a lawyer's love affair with fine print, and a passion for airline bureaucracy. It's a whirring hive mind of IT whizzes, stats majors, aviation nerds and everyone else you knew who skipped the prom.
Schlappig owes his small slice of fame to his blog "One Mile at a Time," a diary of a young man living the life of the world's most implausible airline ad. Posting as often as six times a day, he metes out meticulous counsel on the art of travel hacking — known in this world as the Hobby. It's not simply how-to tips that draw his fans, it's the vicarious thrill of Schlappig's nonstop-luxury life — one recent flight with a personal shower and butler service, or the time Schlappig was chauffeured across a tarmac in a Porsche. But his fans aren't just travel readers — they're gamers, and Schlappig is teaching them how to win.
"I'm very fortunate in that I do what I love," says Schlappig, stretching out in an ergonomic armchair as we reach 30,000 feet and just before the mushroom consommé arrives. In the past year, since ditching the Seattle apartment he shared with his ex-boyfriend, he's flown more than 400,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe 16 times. It's been 43 exhausting weeks since he slept in a bed that wasn't in a hotel, and he spends an average of six hours daily in the sky. He has a freewheeling itinerary, often planning his next destination upon hitting the airport. Just last week, he rocketed through Dallas, Dubai, Oman, Barcelona and Frankfurt. Yet for all his travel, it would be a mistake to call Schlappig a nomad. The moment that he whiffs the airless ambience of a pressurized cabin, he's home.
"An airplane is my bedroom," he says, stretching to reach his complimentary slippers. "It's my office, and it's my playroom." The privilege of reclining in this personal suite costs around $15,000. Schlappig typically makes this trip when he's bored on the weekend. He pays for it like he pays for everything: with a sliver of his gargantuan cache of frequent-flyer miles that grows only bigger by the day. Hong Kong, he says, is his favorite hub, and "the only city I could ever live in." The 16-hour trip has become so routine that it's begun to feel like a pajama-clad blur of champagne and caviar — or, in Schlappig's terminology, a "two-hangover flight."
As the sun descends over the polar circle, a recumbent Schlappig loses himself in a 2 Broke Girls marathon playing on a free-standing flatscreen. "The fact is, we are beating the airlines at their own game," he said last year at a gathering of the Hobby's top talent. "The people who run these programs are idiots." Then he paused. "And we'll always be one step ahead of them."
Schlappig wasn't so much introduced to his fixation as he was raised by it. Born in New York, he became obsessed with airplanes as a small child, endlessly reciting aircraft models and issuing flight announcements from the back of his parents' car. "Benjamin was always different than my two other boys," says his mom, Barbara. "Teachers told me, 'He's ahead of everything.' He was bored."
Around age 13, he discovered the website FlyerTalk, a massive free-for-all forum of all things airline, where users meet to strategize over deals, test for cracks in the bureaucracy and share the spoils. There, Schlappig found a global community playing a massively complex game set upon three basic components.
One of the fundamental steps a Hobbyist can take is choosing an airline to compete for top-tier loyalty status; Schlappig chose United. Nothing was free up front — the object of the game was a return on investment. A Hobbyist doesn't spend unless he can get the same or greater value in return. It took Schlappig about a year to master the dozens of convoluted techniques, exploiting mistakes in ticketing algorithms and learning the ins and outs of the frequent-flyer programs airlines had created after deregulation in the late 1970s. The second leg of the game is credit cards — collecting and canceling as many as possible, and deploying a series of tricks to reap the reward points that bank-and-airline-card partnerships would virtually give away. As he delved deeper, Schlappig learned about a third level, a closely guarded practice called Manufacture Spend, where Hobbyists harness the power of the multitudes of credit cards in their pockets. Airline-affiliated credit cards award points for every dollar spent, so over the decades, Hobbyists manipulated the system by putting purchases on credit cards without ultimately spending anything at all. At its simplest, this included purchasing dollar coins from the U.S. Mint with a credit card and immediately using them to pay off the charge. Schlappig read one detailed post after another that insisted Manufacture Spend was the only true way to fly for free — like sliding a coin into a slot machine and yanking it back with clear string.
Eventually, the best way he learned to visualize this bureaucratic gamesmanship was to see it as a series of table games on a sprawling casino floor — and if the airlines were the house, Schlappig realized, the Hobbyists were the card-counters.
Exceptionally bright and equally motivated, Schlappig saw a way of convincing his parents: by showing them how they could visit family in Germany paying less in first class than flying economy. From there, his parents grew to fully indulge his obsession. By the time he was 15, they were delivering him to the airport on Saturdays and retrieving him Sunday nights at baggage claim. "It was an interesting hobby," says his dad, Arno, as cicadas chirp outside the St. Petersburg, Florida, condo their son bought them after the blog took off. "I said, 'Hey! Keep it up. It's better than smoking pot.' " On a typical weekend, Schlappig would hopscotch to the West Coast and back — Tampa, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., never exiting the airports. "Some of his friends knew," Arno says. "The teachers I don't think were aware of it."
Despite his high IQ, Schlappig was an apathetic student. He attended an all-boys Catholic school, where he struggled to fit in. "When his homework was done, he went back to his room on FlyerTalk," Arno recalls. "And he just posted and posted." Hobbyists say the game takes years to master. But at 16, Schlappig became the first known member to fly across the Pacific Ocean six times in one trip — Chicago, Osaka, San Francisco, Seoul and back again — in July 2006. By his 17th birthday, he'd logged half a million miles. That year, Schlappig was elected to FlyerTalk's governing TalkBoard; in 2009, he ascended to vice president, second to Gary Leff, now 40, one of the Hobby's most popular bloggers. (Schlappig calls Leff "the Godfather" of the Hobby; the two e-mail each other daily.)
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