Monday, May 12, 2008
Dawn MacKeen explains the ins and outs of flying as a courier.
Sep 22, 1998 | Fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave Tokyo on a flight bound for Los Angeles, I was paged. As my name rose above all the other airport sounds, I started to feel sick. I just knew it, the deal was too good to be true; I should have been suspicious of the whole scheme from the very beginning. These guys are probably professionals who have the scam down to a science: They find an unsuspecting person who can't afford a regular ticket -- i.e., me -- and sell her a round-trip ticket from the United States to Japan for $200. Only there's one hitch, they say: You have to give up your baggage space and accompany some "freight" -- contents unknown -- overseas.
Now it was all coming down: I was going to be arrested for the contraband they were trying to smuggle out via my ignorance.
When I approached the Singapore Airlines counter and nervously told the woman my name, she informed me that I had been upgraded from coach to business class.
"Is that all?" I inquired. Yes, that was all.
As it turned out, flying as a courier was as simple as IBC Pacific, the company I had gone through, had said it would be -- and it was all legit. In fact, as I found, being a courier is probably the cheapest way to travel internationally. All it takes is a little flexibility, persistence and willingness to fly on one of the most restricted tickets in the market. And this is an especially good time to try the courier route: Veteran couriers say the cheapest tickets of all are available in September, October, January and February.
Students, professors, retired folk and anyone else with a block of available time and some flexibility in their lives are in the most opportune position to take advantage of the approximately 45,000 round-trip courier flights that take off each year. Although Kelly Monaghan, author of "Air Courier Bargains," says those with a "certain amount of silver in their hair" tend to be more reliable -- translation: They show up -- it's not difficult to become an air courier. In most cases, all you need is to be at least 18 years old (or 21 depending on the company), have a valid passport, dress appropriately (meaning no wrinkled jeans or torn T-shirts), lay off the alcohol in flight and be willing to bring only one carry-on and to travel by yourself. Most assignments are for fixed amounts of time, somewhere between a week and 30 days long, with courier duties both going and returning. What you do in between your departure and return date is up to you (even jumping on another courier flight is an option); the only requirement is to show up at the airport about an hour before other passengers on both directions, so you can check in with the courier company representative.
And just to clear up confusion -- as an on-board courier, you fly on regular passenger planes, not in the back of some rickety old two-engine plane, jammed between boxes of cargo stacked up to your shoulders. "You're no different than other passengers -- you eat the same meals and get the same coach accommodations," says Ron Bracey, an agent for Jupiter Air, a popular courier company located in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hong Kong. "You fly the same as other people who might have spent a couple hundred more dollars than you did." Also, Monaghan adds, one more advantage to being a courier is that the companies will make sure you don't get bumped on overbooked flights, and will even pay to have you upgraded if need be (which might explain what happened to me).
To even start hunting for a courier flight, you have to first abandon all notions of how the regular airline pricing system works. Because with the courier companies, it works just the opposite: The closer it gets to the departure date, the cheaper the ticket becomes. On some occasions, particularly if it's just a few hours (or sometimes even a few days) before the flight is supposed to leave, the ticket may even be free.
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