Pictured: Enjoying a lovely sunset while literally chasing cetaceans

One of the best things about churning and MS is the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want for travel. Earning a ton of points and miles means that you can fulfill your travel wishes, regardless of whether that means relaxed Wyndhams and short domestic hops or Q-Suites and SLHs in Myanmar. 

While that freedom is amazing, it rarely extends far beyond partners and dependents. While there are times that you get to involve others in your churning spoils, real life often gets in the way, regardless of whether it’s free for them or not. 

For those reasons, “making it out of the group chat” can be really difficult. For fellow uncs like myself (i.e. people who also needed to Google the phrase), it essentially means finally doing that thing that you and friends and/or family are always planning in a group chat, knowing full well that it’s very unlikely to actually occur. 

I have a list many pages long of all of the things I’ve tried to do collectively with friends and family as a result of churning and MS, but can count on one hand how many of them actually panned out. All of this means it’s really exciting when the stars align and everyone can get together. 

This past weekend, I was lucky to make it out of the group chat with a handful of fellow churners. Meetups like this make me understand for the faintest millisecond why mid-level managers have such an irrational need to make people come into the office for jobs that don’t require it. 

While you can banter online all day long, it will never quite match being able to get together in person to share wins, losses, and everything in between. 

You’d be surprised how many extremely profitable blind spots you have revealed to you in a weekend just through a high-level discussion of your business-as-usual plays. And no, I’m not talking about unicorns. 

No matter how much time you spend probing, there are things you will inevitably miss, and a casual conversation over a Globalist breakfast is a much better place to get to the bottom of it than a loud channel filled with noise. 

And it’s not just about new angles – meetups also give you a chance to do something that a lot of us only get to do infrequently – talk about churning and MS with someone that actually wants to listen and respond back. I’m a firm believer that going to meetups is a great way to reduce extreme P2 boredom, because you can get your need to talk shop out of your system. 

But for me, the most valuable benefits of meetups aren’t from plays shared there (not that those aren’t nice). It’s more so the chance to actually befriend and hang out with your collaborators and learn about them as people beyond the Slack username or Discord handle. It’s so much easier to trust someone with something sensitive when you’ve literally chased cetaceans with them at a meetup. 

As we joked about all weekend, the true networking at big events like Chicago Seminars doesn’t happen during the panels during the day – it goes down at 2am in the lobby bar. I had plenty of conversations that were much less “how are you hitting this” and was much more “your partner has such a cool job – tell me more about that?”

There were also some inspiring stories of all types of travel being shared. One highlight was my friend Chris booking an aspirational trip for a large group of his old friends, paid for thanks to MS. If that isn’t making out of the group chat, I’m not really sure what is. 

Anyway, that’s enough about my weekend. I’m sharing this to illustrate some of the ideas that I’ve written about in the last few months that I think are going to be crucial for MS success moving forward. 

Building a community of like minded, similar level people is extremely helpful from a profit perspective, but it’s also very important from a trust perspective. With longtime plays largely going the way of the dinosaurs and new ones never moving out of DMs and probe groups, it’s not going to be easy to find what you’re looking for.

But most of all, anything is more fun to do with friends. Even if that thing is waking up early to go hit the street MS grind together. 

Happy February, enjoy the rest of your weekend, and good luck on the probing this week.

ߕߜ߭ߍߙߍߝߐ!