‘Frequent Flyer – The Video’ – the best 20 minute film ever made about air miles

As it is a quiet Bank Holiday today, I thought it was a good time to give this excellent video another push.  Hopefully you may have 20 minutes spare today to enjoy it.

If you’ve never seen “Frequent Flyer – The Video”, then you really should. It has been well over a decade now since Gabriel Leigh made it, I think as a graduation project in the US, but it remains a high quality piece of work. Leigh has gone on to have a successful career in travel journalism.

It is a 20 minute piece about collecting airline miles, in particular the people who do it. It primarily focuses on mileage running – taking very cheap or multi-segment flights on crazy routings in order to accumulate miles or status points very cheaply – rather than credit card churning, probably because it makes for better TV.

This practice has historically been very popular in the US because of the ability to turn a New York to San Francisco flight into an 8-segment marathon, on the same airline.

It has become less common in recent years as the major airlines brought in spend targets as well as mileage targets to retain status, but the recent SAS ‘Million Point Challenge’ brought it back into focus.

In Europe a mileage run was always a lot more difficult because of the number of different airlines – the best you might manage is, potentially, flying London to Zurich to Frankfurt instead of London to Frankfurt, in order to add an extra Star Alliance flight segment or some extra miles.

British Airways tier point runs are also heading to extinction from 1st April 2025 with the new spend-based tier thresholds.  Until then, there are still some good options such as the longer Club Europe routes which earn 160 tier points return and, of course, Qatar Airways business class flights to Asia which earn 560 tier points return (4 x 140 point segments.)

Anyway, back to the video. The production quality is outstanding, as good as any documentary made for the cinema. Randy Petersen, founder of Flyertalk, is featured, as are some other Flyertalk posters, albeit under their real names.

It includes a segment with Steve ‘Beaubo’ Belkin, author of the ‘Mileage Maniac’ book we reviewed last year – buy yourself a good late Christmas present and get it on Amazon here.  He talks about how he infamously hired disabled Thai rice farmers to fly between Bangkok to Chiang Mai all day, every day, in order to take huge advantage of a Star Alliance promotion! Belkin is the first person you see talking when the video starts, Petersen is second.

(It won’t surprise you to learn that Belkin took advantage of the SAS ‘Million Points Challenge’ by offering people free trips around the world, taking in the 15 required SkyTeam airlines, as long as he got to keep control of their SAS mileage account.)

The link to the video is here on Vimeo if it is not showing above. If you click through to Vimeo you will need to register to watch – you can watch the embed above without registering. If you’ve already seen it, watch it again – it is worth it for the quality of the film making alone.

A planned feature length version of ‘Frequent Flyer’ which was the subject of a successful Kickstarter campaign hit the buffers, which was shame.

PS.  Don’t forget the similar Radio 4 documentary, “Inside The World of the Frequent Flyer”, which was broadcast in 2018 and is still available.  This benefits from focusing on the UK approach, whilst possibly suffering from having me in it.  The link to listen is here.