Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
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.)