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Stinger counts only 20 passengers on a recent flight and wonders if Air Canada is going under. Cargoagent takes him to task for posing such a question. "Are you bored today?" he snipes. "Surely you could have come up with a better way to stir the pot." Simon weighs in with this observation: "Big difference between 'a' flight and 'most' flights."

Such is the back and forth when high-flying business travellers hook up on Internet discussion forums. Stinger, Cargoagent and Simon are pseudonyms for three regular members of CanFlyer (http://www.canflyer.com), an online frequent-flier community. Joining them in the ongoing dialogue are occasional travellers, airline employees, students and retirees. Their common bond: a driving need to seek or share knowledge and opinions about loyalty programs, airlines and hotels.

Online frequent-flier communities take many forms. Sites such as http://www.points.com and http://www.loyaltymatch.com are basic bulletin boards; they allow members of reward programs to trade points or turn them into cash, but the sites offer few opportunities to connect directly and personally.

Meanwhile, corporate travel companies are getting into the act, with Expedia and American Express Business Travel announcing new social networking sites this month that they hope will allow business travellers to share information about airports, flight delays, even the weather.

But the real chatter can be found at FlyerTalk (http://www.flyertalk.com) and CanFlyer, where many members have become lifelong friends, planning joint projects and arranging to meet on the road or in each other's hometown.

CanFlyer's most obsessive member has posted 10,000 comments since the site went live three years ago. Of course that's peanuts when compared with Colorado-based FlyerTalk. About 900,000 individuals sign in every month, and a number of them have racked up 40,000 posts each over the past 10 years, says Randy Petersen, the site's founder. Some people spend 20 to 30 hours a week on the site, and the forum dedicated to Air Canada issues is one of the most active.

Postings tend to be a guy thing, with women accounting for just 15 to 20 per cent of the members on FlyerTalk's Air Canada forum.

Many frequent travellers are loners and FlyerTalk provides that social community they don't have, says Petersen. As well, they tend to be "techie people," at home with the Internet and the latest electronic communication gadgets. And, he adds, "they tend to be pretty opinionated about travel and about each other."

According to Marc Smith, senior research sociologist with Microsoft Research, the denizens of FlyerTalk really aren't much different than those who take part in forums about car racing or knitting. In any online community, he says, most members chirp in only occasionally. The bulk of the postings come from the 2 per cent of users he calls "hypercontributors." These can be broken down into a number of categories including the question answerers, the discussion catalysts and the negative types who are rude and add little of value. A quick perusal of FlyerTalk shows its members fit the standard pattern.

It's easy to tell the hardcore fliers from the wannabes on the sites. Occasional travellers tend to discuss strategies for earning points in order to claim free reward trips. The hardened road warriors talk about "status."

Having status puts a traveller in the top tiers of frequent-flier programs, making them eligible for such perks as free upgrades to business class or immediate attention if a flight is delayed or cancelled. For someone who spends hours each week on airplanes, having status today is more important than claiming yet another flight, albeit a free one, at some time in the future. Some people have been known to spend a weekend flying back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria just to earn enough miles to achieve status for the following year. Such trips are known as mileage runs, and FlyerTalk devotes an entire discussion board to the practice.

The site began as InsideFlyer, a magazine Petersen started to update frequent fliers on changes to travel reward programs. The feedback was so great that he launched FlyerTalk in 1995. It bombed, mainly because the Internet was still in its infancy. He relaunched it in 1998 and, 10 million postings later, has never looked back.

Many airline and hotel companies regularly monitor the site to see what their best customers are saying. Some even host FlyerTalk events.

The site is divided into forums for each of the reward programs offered by individual airlines, hotel chains, rental car companies and U.S.-based credit cards. Regular Air Canada passengers, for example, congregate at the Air Canada Aeroplan forum, where they discuss the carrier's frequent-flier program and share rumours, news, insights, gripes and the occasional kudo involving the airline that plays a huge role in their lives. WestJet regulars, a less combative bunch, meet at WestJet Passenger Perks.

Other discussion boards cover such travel-related topics as dining, technology and photography.

Many of the discussions involve the minutia of travel - types of aircraft, fare rules, upgrade policies and the relative merits of various frequent-flier programs.

While FlyerTalk was designed for heavy-duty frequent fliers, about half the members travel only occasionally, Petersen says.

A real community Tales of contributors banding together are legion.

In 2002, an anonymous group of Air Canada FlyerTalkers protested cutbacks at the carrier by launching a website and printing a fake brochure using the name Errorplan, a spoof of the airline's Aeroplan program. Claiming its copyright was being infringed, Air Canada threatened to call in the FBI and said it would use all means, "both legal and quasi-legal," to stop the

parody.

A year earlier, some Air Canada regulars who had met on the site discovered a way to get cheap fares and oodles of extra frequent-flier points by routing their business trips through Mexico. They called themselves the Mexican Hat Dance Club, and their objective, naturally, was to earn those all-important status miles. The party ended when Air Canada, Mexicana and United Airlines filed new fares to close a loophole.

Then there was the group of U.S.-based FlyerTalkers who used to fly to Toronto for a weekend each September to attend a taping of the CBC comedy The Red Green Show, trade travel tales, consume "real Canadian beer" and Alberta beef and smoke "a couple of good Cubans."

Petersen says it's understandable that travellers turn to FlyerTalk when they are alone in a hotel. But surprisingly, only 30 per cent of all postings are submitted by members while they are on the road; 20 per cent come from homes and the remaining 50 per cent from the workplace. Lunchtime is the peak time for submissions. And members live in more than 130 countries, he says.

A site of their own

As in any community, there are feuds and falling-outs.

Cedrid Nagy of Tofino, B.C., spent a lot of time travelling and contributing to FlyerTalk while attending university. He started CanFlyer shortly after graduation to cater to posters looking for a distinctively Canadian meeting place - it seems some former FlyerTalkers felt their postings were being belittled by fellow members or relocated by site moderators.

CanFlyer's 350 members have tallied some 50,000 messages over the site's first three years.

While FlyerTalk has separate discussion groups for individual airlines, CanFlyer defines its forums by airline alliances, so discussions of Air Canada are grouped with those of such Star Alliance partners as United Airlines and Lufthansa. The arrangement, Nagy says, makes it easy for Canadians to find the postings most relevant to the carriers and routes they fly.

At least they all share a love for the minutia of travel.

*****

Tips from FlyerTalk and CanFlyer

The best Air Canada business-class seats are 5 H and K, followed by rows 3 and 4. They are farthest from the galley and toilets.

On most international routes there is no charge for stopovers of less than 24 hours.

Starwood, Holiday Inn and Marriott all have hotels near London's Heathrow Airport that offer cheap prices at certain times.

The Nexus card, which many frequent fliers use to speed through American pre-clearance and Canadian customs, is terminated just before a holder's passport expires.

If you have a purchased ticket on a WestJet flight, you can request standby for an earlier flight but must pay a fee.

Buffalo is an awesome alternative to flying out of Toronto's overpriced Pearson airport.

To spot the federal air marshals on U.S. flights, look for the person with a Hawaiian shirt not tucked into their pants or the stiff-looking person wearing a jacket.

For a great bar experience, try the Railway Club in Vancouver (old-school members-only pub) or Milk & Honey (highbrow cocktails) in New York.

A BlackBerry will play movies that have been transcoded from DVD to 3GP using a program from Xilisoft.