About
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Nicholas Kralev first traveled with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as a 26-year-old Financial Times correspondent in 2000. Over the next decade, he took more than 160 flights on the white-and-blue Air Force planes with Albright’s three successors, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton — most of them as the Washington Times’ diplomatic correspondent.
The Boeing 757 aircraft, known in the Air Force as C-32, first arrived in 1999 and their seats resembled domestic first-class seats on most U.S. commercial carriers. Since Nicholas had flown mostly in coach, that was a big improvement.
In 2002, he took more commercial than government flights and achieved top elite airline status for the first time — and began to discover the luxuries of travel. The trouble with that, of course, is that once you’ve been in first or business class, you never want to go to the back of the plane again, so he started looking for ways to stay upfront.
He decided to learn as much as possible about frequent-flier programs, elite benefits and global airline alliances. Because the Times could afford to pay only low economy fares, he also began learning all he could about fares, inventory and booking. There were no books or seminars, so he relied on his curiosity to pick things up from airline employees. He started speaking their “language,” and the more he traveled, the more he learned. He soon mastered the art of buying cheap economy tickets but flying in first or business class. The last time he sat in coach on both domestic and intercontinental flights was eight years ago.
Except when he traveled with the secretary of state. In 2003, the Air Force installed new communications equipment on the C-32s, for which it made space by putting coach seats in the last two rows, where the press corps sits. As useful as it was to be on the secretary’s plane, Nicholas missed the much more comfortable commercial premium seats, which later became flat beds, and better meals and frequent-flier miles. He realized he could have all that for much less money than what the Times paid the State Department, which charged full one-way economy fares from point to point.
So in 2004, he adopted a new practice — starting a trip with the secretary but returning home commercially. That wasn’t a blanket policy, though, and he still did some trips entirely on the official plane and others entirely commercially. He took advantage of the situation — in addition to saving the Times thousands of dollars a year — and to his knowledge about fares out of the United States added familiarity with fares originating in other countries.
He has now flown almost 2 million miles on 50 airlines to more than 200 cities in over 80 countries. He has sat in first class on some of the world’s best carriers, including Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and SWISS, enjoyed black caviar on board and been driven to the plane on the tarmac in a brand-new Porsche.
In an attempt to encourage more people to travel, in 2008, Nicholas decided to begin sharing his knowledge and experience in a weekly business travel column in the Times called “On the Fly.” But that format had its limitations, and the realities of everyday travel weren’t getting any better. He kept seeing how airline agents mistreated passengers by feeding them made-up rules and other nonsense, often because of poor training. At the same time, he witnessed rude and entitled travelers who never bothered to read fare rules and other regulations and blamed the airlines for a bad experience — instead of their own ignorance.
Two years later, Nicholas created the “On the Fly” seminars to help educate more people how to become better travelers. He designed a curriculum based on saving money and flying in luxury — a great recipe for a happy traveler.
READ NICHOLAS KRALEV’S ‘ON THE FLY’ COLUMN
