Frequent fliers take wing on a busman's holiday

If you were always on the road and seemed to live on airplanes, would you spend your vacation visiting airlines?

More than 200 vagabond business travelers, peripatetic frequent-flier-mile addicts and aviation enthusiasts did just that recently. Over four days, they traveled from the United States to Germany, Norway and France to meet with executives, pilots and mechanics at four airlines -- plus representatives of aircraft manufacturer Airbus.

The trip, organized by members of FlyerTalk.com, a website that caters to frequent fliers, showcased the passion still ignited by airlines and travel, even when service cuts, delays and fees make travel anything but romantic these days. Some in the group fly more than 300,000 miles a year and tell people their residence is Boeing or Airbus. And yet they still want to fly more for fun.

FlyerTalk has 220,000 members, which represents lots of ticket-buying. Many of them are mileage junkies and use the forums to share strategies to score tickets, upgrades, lounge access and other perks. Or to harp on individual airlines.

FlyerTalk members are vocal when airlines change policies, cut the value of miles or run sloppy operations. FlyerTalk has pressured some airlines to rescind cuts, and bad reviews posted on the site -- www.flyertalk.com -- can hurt business. So some airlines have taken to occasionally wining and dining them and monitoring FlyerTalk, Twitter and blogs, responding directly to customers who post problems and coddling online communities with special sales and, in extreme cases, CEO dinners and backstage access at airports. Indeed, last week's trip was organized with help from airlines -- including Lufthansa, Continental and United -- in the Star Alliance, one of the three major airline groupings that market seats and services together.

"This is the first time in the last 10 years I fear I am speaking to a group that knows more about my product than me," Thierry Antinori, Lufthansa AG executive vice president of sales and marketing, told the group.

Participants on the trip -- dubbed the "Star Alliance Mega DO" (as in, a really big "do") -- ranged in age from 20-year-old Will Steele, who lives with his mother in Auckland, New Zealand, works as an Internet communications consultant and flies around the world at the drop of a cheap fare or frequent-flier ticket, to Patricia Hansen of San Diego, 69 years old, who loves to travel though her husband does not. So Hansen travels with other FlyerTalkers, taking advantage of the group's organized trips or just looking up other members in far-flung cities around the world.

"Wherever you go, you have friends," she said. "If you're not a good conversationalist, you can always talk about miles."

FlyerTalkers know the best seats on each plane and rules and restrictions of different fare classes. They leave notes to each other in airline magazines or put codes to free Internet access in airport lounges on the bottom of fruit bowls for their compadres.

The Mega DO -- which started in Chicago -- gave the road warriors an education in how airlines work. At each stop, airline executives greeted them with singers and dancers, mechanics and pilots, ample food and drink and tours of engine shops, training facilities, airplanes and hangars.

Like kids on a school field trip, they filed through United Airlines crew briefing rooms in Chicago, quizzed maintenance experts at Continental's engine shop in Newark, N.J., practiced flight-attendant skills at Lufthansa's training center in Frankfurt, Germany.

They asked airline workers about snowplows at Chicago's O'Hare, bird-strikes in engines, access to airport clubs and the environmental impact of deicing fluid. They learned how airplanes are cycled through scheduled maintenance, how workers assign gates, how pilots prepare for long journeys and how Airbus puts together its giant double-deck plane.

They picked up news along the way -- United is planning to implement a three-hour limit on keeping people stuck on long-delayed flights; Lufthansa is planning to fly its first Airbus A380 super-jumbo between New York and Frankfurt.

Participants flew commercial (some used miles) between U.S. stops and to Europe. Then, a charter flight on a Boeing 757-300, which cost $697 for coach or $1,138 for business class, took them from Frankfurt to Oslo, Norway, to visit Scandinavian Airlines System, then Toulouse, France, for a tour of Airbus A380 assembly buildings and back to Frankfurt.