I remember when 'flybuys' first came out in Australia they had neglected to handle cases where goods were returned. Trampoline sales (and returns) went through the roof!
Flying to Thailand and spending an entire week taking $18 flights back and forth between two cities seems like a pretty incredible cost to pay for First Class seats for a year.<p>I suppose if I was a consultant and flew every week, I might feel differently, but I was pretty surprised at how much (in non monetary units) you have to pay to get "cheap" upgrades.
I've been looking in to this recently and the point he makes about flying crazy routes to get extra miles is a little off. It may work for some airlines, but I know for others you earn miles for how far your start and end points are apart from each other, not how long your route actually was.<p>So if you're flying Los Angeles to Seattle, but have a layover in Miami, you would only earn the miles that someone flying Los Angeles to Seattle would.
Cool - this is exactly what we're working on over at mileagebrain.com.<p>It is a system, and it can be hacked - I figured it quite likely that the hacker crowd would be interested in this (like I am).