The Ghost Inventory

The gate at O'Hare smelled faintly of jet fuel and wet carpet. Outside, the heat shimmered off the wing of a United 737, and the board said New Orleans was on time.

That is how these things begin. Not with a map, but with a number on a screen.

Someone flying economy on July 27th, a Monday, looked up ORD to MSY and found what we all want to find: options. Flightpoint, that patient aggregator of other people’s promises, laid them out like fruit in a bowl. Nonstop UA1761 for 12,500 Virgin Australia Velocity points plus $9.53, five seats left. Nonstop AA2198 for 20,000 American miles plus $5.60. AA3896 for 32,500. And then the cheaper, slower things, the American connections that bend through Charlotte or Dallas for 11,000 to 13,000 miles.

It looks like abundance. That is the trick.

We have learned to speak of points as if they were money, but they are more like weather systems. They move, they obscure, they have pressure fronts. A price of 12,500 for a nonstop in high summer would have been, a few years ago, a glitch. Now it is a Velocity award. Which is to say, an Australian airline’s currency being spent on an American plane that you will board in Illinois to go eat gumbo.

For a U.S. traveler, Velocity is useful precisely because no one thinks to look there. It is an attic. The same United seat that United might want 27,000 of its own miles for can be had for half, because Virgin Australia and United have a quiet agreement that most people forget exists. The question is not whether the points are good. The question is whether you can get them where you need them in time, and whether you want to keep a balance in a program whose metal you will never fly.

This is the second trick. Transferable has come to mean useful, but transferable really means movable. It does not mean it will stay put.

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Then there is the question of whether the seat is there at all.

Every frequent flyer has a story about phantom availability. You see the seat, you transfer the points, you go to book, and the seat blinks out. Or worse, it lets you book it and then un-books you days later with a polite email about an inventory error. The search engines cache. The airlines do not always talk to each other in real time. Velocity sees what United told it an hour ago. Or what it thinks United said.

There is an etiquette to this now. You check on United.com first if you can. You search one seat, not five. Five seats at that price on a summer Monday to MSY is either a gift or a mirage. You never transfer until you can actually hold or ticket. You screenshot everything. These are folk practices, like tapping the fuselage before boarding.

What interests me is not the hack but the feeling underneath it. For a moment, when you see four or five ways to get from one place to another for very little, you feel chosen. The system has opened for you. You have outsmarted something large and indifferent.

Of course the system is indifferent. It does not know you are going to New Orleans. It does not know why. It only knows that AA2198 at 20,000 miles is a standard price and 11,000 miles with a connection in Charlotte is what you pay for your time. It knows that $5.60 is the government’s cut, and $9.53 is the same cut plus a little extra for the privilege of using someone else’s points.

The best award, strictly speaking, is probably the simplest one. The nonstop you can actually ticket. Often that is the American flight at 20,000, because you have the miles and the airline operates it. Sometimes it is the United flight via Velocity, if you can confirm it live on Virgin’s site and the points are already there. The cheapest is rarely the best. The cheapest asks you to spend a day in an airport you did not want to visit.

I watched UA1761 push back. The wingtip was red at the edge where the sun hit it.

No one at the gate was thinking about Velocity points. They were thinking about whether their bag would fit.

And that seemed about right.