Now that's what I call a frequent flyer

I like to travel. And by that I mean I generally enjoy being somewhere else. I say generally because, when I was doing my share of business travel, I sometimes ended up in places where I didn't really care to be. (I mean, what was I doing that time in Lynchburg, VA?) But the part of travel that I'm fairly meh on is the getting there part, especially when the getting there part involves flying.

Don't get me wrong. Being able to fly somewhere is great. I certainly wouldn't have made all those trips to the West Coast if I'd had to spend a week on a train getting there, and another week getting back; all those trips to Europe if I'd had to spend a week on an ocean liner getting there, and another week getting back

But, let's face it, airplane travel is a drag. The seats are too tight. The person in the seat in front of you reclines their seat so that their head is in your lap. The man sitting next to you is a man-spreader part excellence. Or a hacking coffer. Or a nose-picker. 

The food - when they serve it - is terrible. (But you eat it anyway.)

The toilets? Well, there are no words...

Even if you're flying in the lap of first or business class luxury, where the seats are comfier and the food better, there are cancellations, reroutes, delays that don't discriminate by what class you're flying in. Red eyes that weren't supposed to be red eyes. Nights spent in an overheated, noisy airport hotel. Gate changes. Terminal changes. Three hours on the runway, eight hours at the gate.

I don't suffer from fear of flying, but to me it's a necessary evil, the means to an end.

I can't imagine wanting to be on planes all the time, and I'm just as happy that my career didn't require insane amounts of business travel. (Plenty. Just not insane.)

But Steven Rothstein was someone who traveled a lot and liked it just fine. So back in the 1980's, when American Airlines was on shaky financial footing and came up with a quick-cash scheme to sell lifetime passes, Rothstein got out his checkbook and bought a lifetime, first-class ticket for $250K. He then went and sprung for a lifetime companion ticket.

Over the following decades, Rothstein made the most of his expensive purchase, clocking up a staggering 30 million miles and costing the airline an estimated $21 million (c. A$33 million) in flight fares.

By 2008, American Airlines decided they’d had enough. They revoked Rothstein’s precious pass mid-trip, breaking the news at the gate just as he was about to board yet another flight. (Source: DMARGE)

Rothstein, an investment banker, was doing his frequent flying back in the day - the golden (hah!) age of business travel - when people thought nothing of jumping on a flight to somewhere for an hour long business meeting. (Been there/done that, including a day trip to London. And I wasn't all that much of a business traveler.) Here's how Rothstein racked up his miles:

During the period when he held the pass, Rothstein would often visit the same destination multiple times. He was even known to take a return flight between his Chicago base and Ontario so that he could pick up a sandwich in his favorite restaurant. (Source: AeroTime)

Flying from Chicago to Ontario to pick up a sandwich? I have been known to bring back take-out from Shun Lee in NYC so that my husband could have our favorite dun-dun noodles and spicy cucumbers. But the take-out was incidental to the trip. I never got on a flight just be pick up dun-dun noodles. Let alone a sandwich. Sheesh. No wonder American began to feel that Rothstein was taking advantage of the system.

All told:

Over the course of 21 years, Rothstein took – 1,000 flights to New York City

500 flights to San Francisco
500 flights to Los Angeles
500 flights to London
120 flights to Tokyo
80 flights to Paris
80 flights to Sydney
50 flights to Hong Kong
and roughly 7,000 flights to destinations across the rest of the world.

Yikes, and I by that I mean YIKES! 

But the sandwich trip wasn't what caused American to crack down on Rothstein, and - once Rothstein sued the airline - to sue him back.

American claimed that Rothstein had abused the system, sometimes booking companion tickets for no reason other than to have an empty seat next to him where he could rest his carry on bag. And sometimes booking no-show tickets just for the hell of it. 

His daughter has said that sometimes Rothstein did book flights he had no intention of taking because he was depressed after the death of his son. Over the years, Rothstein had made friends via phone with the AA booking agents he had access to as part of his lifetime ticket deal. He would call them in the middle of the night, the daughter said, because he was sad and lonely. In the course of talking with the agents he'd befriended, he often made reservations for flights he never intended to take.

Rothstein maintained that he never violated the program rules.

Anyway, there were suits/countersuits which settled out of court.

Steven Rothstein wasn't the only one to purchase a lifetime ticket on American. When the program was in operation, the airline sold 66 of them. (At the time, other airlines also offered special air pass schemes. E.g., pay a fixed fee for a fixed number of flights; unlimited flights but over a specific time period. But nothing comparable to American's offer.) And Rothstein wasn't the only one whose pass was revoked for overuse.

The wonderfully named Jacques E. Vroom, Jr. also got his pass lifted in 2008 and supposedly after all this time, is still involved in suit/countersuit. Again, Vroom's claim was/is that he wasn't violating any of the original rules which, if they existed anywhere other than in a couple of heads at American, were unwritten in the original contract. Neglecting to include such fine print in that contract turned out to be costly.

Basic mathematics shows that these two customers alone cost American Airlines more than it ever made by selling the AAirpasses to begin with. Fortunately for Rothstein and Vroom, but unfortunately for the airline, it took the carrier years to figure out that these two customers alone were costing it millions of dollars annually. 

Anyway, American canceled their unlimited first class travel program in 1994 - well before they tried cracking down on Rothstein and Vroom, but apparently after they figured out the program was a way too costly one.

American did try to briefly revive the program in 2004, offering it in the Neiman-Marcus insane-luxury Christmas catalog. At $3M, there were no takers. 

Personally, I think that American should have let Rothstein and Vroom keep flying. Sure, maybe come up with new, more explicit rules. But let them keep flying. By now, they would likely be aging out of any desire to hop on a plane to pick up a sandwich.

I just can't imagine who'd want to have access to unlimited to flights. There aren't enough Biscoff cookies - American Airlines snack-of-choice for steerage - in the world that would get me on a flight if I didn't have to be on.