A frequent flyer racked up such a shocking amount of flights on his lifetime ticket that he cost American Airlines $21 million and the airline canceled his pass.
In 1981, American Airlines offered avid travelers the opportunity of, well, a lifetime – first-class tickets for life to any person willing to cough up a whopping $250,000 right then and there.
Alas, the airline underestimated the lengths one particular traveler would go to in order to squeeze as much as he could out of the lifetime pass. Forget the viral trash bag ‘life hack’ and a plane passenger’s reclining seat hack, because one man outdid them all.
Steven Rothstein well and truly hacked the system with American Airlines’ AAirpass (Caroline Rothstein)
The quarter-of-a-million AAirpass offered ‘unlimited first class travel for life’, not only in the US but across the globe. Not only that, but for an additional $150,000 you could bring along a companion for your trips.
Now, $250,000 on its own or with the companion pass thrown on top – totaling $350,000 – is a hell of a lot money, but if you were a frequent first class flyer and were planning on traveling a lot for the rest of your life it’s not hard how to see how this could be a pretty good deal – to passengers, certainly not the airline.
And while American Airlines quickly realized it may not’ve quite fully thought the deal through, discontinuing the AAirpass by 1994, by that point a total of 28 people are reported by Luxury Launches as having signed up to the airline’s offer.
How did Steven Rothstein cost American Airlines $21 million?
Those customers include Steven Rothstein, who purchased the pass in 1987 and squeezed everything he could out of it for 21 years, costing American Airlines over an eye-watering $21 million in the process.
And if you were wondering how many flights he actually took, well, it’s a lot.
American Airlines trying to run away from Rothstein boarding yet another flight (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
Rothstein ‘traveled’ a smug total of 30 million miles as an American Airlines first class passenger on his pass, booking a whopping 10,000 flights with the company.
And Reddit users have broken that down even further.
One user said: “21 yrs X 365 days in a year = 7665 That means he took more than one flight everyday in that time frame. Sheesh.”
How many of those he actually took who knows, but even if he took a fraction of the 10,000 he booked that’s still an impressive number.
Why did Steven Rothstein book so many American Airlines tickets?
After American Airlines took away Rothstein’s pass in 2008, he sued the airline for breaking the contract, however the company argued he’d ‘fraudulently used’ the pass’ companion feature by sometimes booking extra seats under fictitious names, his daughter told The Guardian.
Ultimately, the judge ruled in American Airlines’ favor and Rothstein may’ve not been left with a lifetime pass, but at least he had nearly a lifetime of memories from his trips.
Steven’s daughter Caroline Rothstein explained the sad reasoning behind her dad booking some 2,000 ’empty’ flight seats over the years.
Asking her father why he did this, Steven revealed it was a way of coping with the death of his teenage son – Caroline’s brother – in 2002. Josh, 15, had died after being hit by a car while walking down the street.
Steven explained: “When everyone was asleep in the house, and I had nobody to talk to, and I was lonely about Josh’s death, I would telephone American Airlines reservations and speak to the agents about who knows what for an hour and then at the end, they’d ask me, oh, what reservation was I calling about to make, and I would say, ‘Oh yeah, I need to go to San Francisco next week’.
“I really didn’t need to go to San Francisco. I was just very confused and very lonely and I was calling American Airlines because they were logical people for me to speak to. They knew me. I knew them. I knew their names. I knew their lives.”
