This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's caller describes his business idea as being truly up in the air. Now, like me, he's all about airline status. At least I used to be about that. I used to fly 300,000 miles a year, sometimes more. These days it's much less, but I still keep up with the world of travel hacking, at least somewhat.
So I'm interested in elite status. I'm interested in earning lots of points and miles, redeeming for good trips. So our caller is gonna tell you more about his business idea. It's my job to offer some feedback that might be helpful to him and also insightful to others. And that's because these questions, it's not just about a question for one person and my particular response.
These questions are a proxy for our global community of people who all want to create extra income. So if you learn the skill of generating valuable ideas, that skill can serve you for life. And part of that process is being able to identify a target market, a clear product or service, and a way to monetize the connection between the two. So I hope as you hear these different questions and ideas, it gets you thinking about what your particular idea is or what your best idea is, because you're gonna have a lot of ideas and what you might do to turn that idea into income. All right, that question, how to get paid to earn airline status for busy executives, it's coming up after this quick message from our sponsor.
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Hi, Chris, this is Harry from Dallas and I've been following the show for a couple of years. I have a business idea that's truly up in the air. I wanna help earn airline elite status for executives who travel a lot, but not enough to qualify for the top tier platinum levels. I've got some experience in doing this, including some strategies that are black hat or that I just wouldn't talk about for competitive reasons. My pitch is for $500, I can help you get global services with United Airlines or concierge key with American Airlines.
These are levels that are otherwise very difficult to achieve. For the right person, $500 is definitely worth it. But my problem is I want to stay under the radar of the airlines. I know they won't like this. While also reaching my target market, how can I accomplish this tricky objective?
Thanks. [Music]
All right, as a long time traveler and travel hacker, I can appreciate this idea. And I wanna avoid getting into the weeds too much in my answer because I tend to be a geek about travel hacking. And Harry mentions a couple of different status levels. He mentioned platinum at first, which is not that hard to achieve.
There are lots of people who had achieved platinum status or the highest published status. But what he's talking about more specifically is these higher, more exclusive levels that aren't even published or at least hard to find information about. Like the airlines don't provide qualification guidelines for these statuses concierge key global services with United because they're so difficult. The short version is that for a person to achieve that status, they usually need to spend a lot of money. There's not a way to hack it or at least not one that I know of, apparently Harry does.
They normally just spend like $50,000 a year or more or be a corporate buyer of travel for a large company that's booking a lot of trips for employees. So as I said, this is different from the status you can earn just by flying a lot. So if Harry really can do this, if he really has figured something out, it's pretty significant. But because these levels are so exclusive, as he kind of alludes to, the airlines definitely wouldn't want to open the floodgates to lots of signups. And so therein lies the problem.
If you start somehow referring people, a large number of people, helping a large number of people get this status, then that will be noticed. So I guess the best way he can do it is by referral, maybe very gently pitching this to some long time travel bloggers who might know people who are interested. I definitely wouldn't start putting this out on a bunch of forums and on Reddit and on your website because there are compliance people for airlines who actually monitor some of those forums. And there's nothing just to be clear, there's nothing illegal or wrong about Harry doing this. Well, I don't actually know how he's doing it.
So that could be a thing. But in terms of a service that helps people earn elite status, nothing wrong with that. It's just something that would be noticed at this high level. So I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but I'm curious about it. So good luck, be careful, Harry.
Also, I only have the lowly status that comes from flying 100,000 miles a year, executive platinum on American, not this secret elite status. So feel free to let me try it out and I will report back. Okay, probably not gonna happen, but just thought I'd throw it out there. Listeners, if you've got a question, www.sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to feature them throughout the year, along with updates from listeners like Harry as they launch and grow their projects.
Thanks for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
