Count them up: 40 million loyalty miles

CLEVELAND – He was accused of being a drug dealer, a spy, a money launderer.

In truth, Steve Belkin was a compulsive frequent flyer mile collector, accumulating over 40 million miles over two decades.

Belkin, of University Heights, recounts his obsession – some might call it addiction – in a new book, “Mileage Maniac: My Genius, Madness and a Touch of Evil, to Amass 40 Million Frequent Flyer Miles,” writes while he was stuck. in Mozambique during the pandemic.

Belkin has used the miles to travel the world, often with family and friends, and generally in International Business Class. He has also used the miles to support several travel-focused businesses, including Competitours, a travel competition in Europe, and his latest venture, Scuba Hunt Cozumel.

Belkin, 58, also admits racking them up as a competitive sport – the more the better, whether he really needs them or not.

“Sometimes my zeal for mileage-saving strategies outweighed savoring the fruits of my labor,” admits Belkin, the son of longtime Cleveland concert promoters Jules and Fran Belkin.

He became addicted to the habit in the late 1980s, when he tricked a group of unemployed actors in Los Angeles to return home for Thanksgiving under his name (fly under someone else’s name). was legal at the time). He’s driven a million miles with that effort – and never looked back.

Since then, he has been caught in the sights of United, American and many other airlines for what he calls his “scaling” plans, that is, to take the promotion of a company and multiply it. by 10, 20 or 100.

Belkin maintains that he never broke the law, or even airline rules.

Without a doubt, he extended the rules in ways that even the airlines could not have imagined.

Among his most imaginative (and lucrative) plans: A plan that earned him 7.5 million miles on Thai Air, a Star Alliance partner with United. He hired 20 people from northern Thailand to do 200 short flights for $ 8 each. The effort won him the attention of an agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration, who believed he was using the flights to transport opium to the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia.

Belkin managed to get out of trouble. “He was right that I was the kingpin – he just got the product wrong,” Belkin writes.

Another awards race took him from Israel to the United Arab Emirates, which was problematic at the time due to the Israeli stamp on his passport, and led to a lengthy interrogation in Tel Aviv and a charge in Dubai. that he was a spy.

In addition to traveling for miles, Belkin used a variety of other methods to increase her collection: magazine subscriptions, overnight stays in a hotel room, credit card applications on behalf of her children, and more.

This one even got him thinking: in the late 2000s, he took out a home equity loan on his house – without telling his wife, Julie, a Cleveland doctor – in order to take advantage of an offered promotion. by Cathay Pacific. It was a temporary move – he closed the loan within months – but he regretted it almost immediately.

“It was the nadir of my questionable driving in the mileage world,” he wrote. “The foundations of my marriage could fall apart if I couldn’t do it.”

Subsequently, he transferred the mortgage to his wife’s name. “I trusted myself, but I trusted him a lot more,” he wrote. “My exploitation of the family nest egg would never happen again. “

At least one program did not go as planned. He was working with a group of mileage freaks – the Tenacious Twenty, he calls them – in hopes of profiting from a deal offered by USAirways and an Internet storage company, EasyCGI. The group of 20 planned to buy enough Internet storage to acquire 187 million air miles; Belkin himself would rake in $ 57 million.

The company got wind of the plan and refused to honor the purchases. The Tenacious Twenty sued the company, as well as the airline, and ultimately settled out of court on terms Belkin cannot disclose.

Subsequently, he wrote: “It was official. I was done with the world of mileage.

Except he wasn’t. Not yet.

What really convinced Belkin to come out of the game were the changing rules of the game itself.

Airlines, he said, no longer offer their loyalty programs to travelers who fly the most, but rather to travelers who spend the most money. This makes earning miles a lot less lucrative and a lot less fun.

“The game has not only changed powerfully, but it’s not worth playing at all,” he said in a recent email interview. “What the airlines call frequent flyer programs, I now call them treason programs. Allocation tables have been eliminated, there is dynamic (arbitrary) pricing. Imagine earning miles without knowing how much to redeem. “

He added: “I really nailed the golden age over the past two decades.”

While he no longer actively accumulates miles, he is definitely spending them, with upcoming trips planned to Indonesia and Tahiti, and millions of miles still at his disposal.