Plus personal crawler projects and contacts with similar-minded people.
Warning: if you don't find this fun it's probably not worth the time. Expect to spend a lot of time chasing these deals.
It does seem to get harder over time, judging from my ~5 years in the game. Just a few years ago there were gaping holes in the system, allowing anyone to buy 100k miles from US Airways for $1200 and then spend them on quite on e.g. a 90k mile (or was it 110k?) First class roundtrips Europe/NA-Asia with e.g. ANA, Asiana iirc.
Pro:
- Decent almost business class for $1400 USD roundtrip
- You can buy single trips for 50% of the roundtrip cost
Con:
- Their irregular ops handling is disastrous. They use a small fleet of 787s for transatlantic flights, with zero spare capacity, so when a plane breaks somehow you basically have to wait for them to repair it. For that reason I avoid them on trips into the US (for planned meetings there) but sometimes use them on the way back.
The problem with travel hacking (it's not really economically feasible to fly business between Europe and US for most of us) is that you get so used to it that every single transatlantic work trip becomes a big complicated optimization game. Flying economy simple stops being an option.
This time the other day I lucked out via what seemed to be a Star Alliance-wide mistake fare between Scandinavia and Seattle and a few more US cities ($700 for r/t business class!). That plus a cheap connecting flight to the Bay area fixed it for this time.