These are some of the participants in the first official “On the Fly” Seminars in Washington last week. Everyone who came was extremely satisfied — in fact, none of my students had expected to learn nearly as much as they did.
As you can see from the comments on the seminars’ website, they were called “a traveler’s dream,” “incredibly revealing and extraordinarily valuable,” and “a mandatory tool to save money for frequent fliers and corporations.”
“These are perfectly practical methods to make the system work to your advantage — just a few steps to get inexpensive flights, ideal itineraries, upgrades, no fees, and free flights,” said David Aidekman, founder of Adventurati, a group travel company.
Charles Zhang, who came all the way from Princeton, N.J., to attend one of the DC seminars, said he has had top elite status with a couple of airlines for a while, and flies more than 150,000 miles a year. “But I still learned lots of new things from your seminar, which I had never heard before,” he said. “I will use my skills from you seminar toward my future flights, and enjoy my travel more.”
Of course, I couldn’t be happier with the feedback, but it seems I have a serious challenge to overcome: It’s clear the seminars are extremely valuable for those who attend, but the problem is that they don’t know that until they come. Despite the detailed curriculum and syllabuses I’ve posted, last week’s participants said they had no idea that much of what I taught was possible and available to all travelers.
So it seems I need to come up with a catchier way to compress material that takes hours to teach into a few soundbites and paragraphs. Wish me luck!
In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce that the next seminars in Washington will take place on July 23 and 24. Before that, I’ll be offering a seminar in Anchorage, Alaska, on July 6. I’m also looking into doing the same in New York, either in July or August.
Tags: Alaska, Anchorage, frequent fliers, Princeton, Seminars, Travel, Washington
