LAST month, American Ben Schlappig’s Instagram page showed him jetting out of Beijing, dining on coffee and cake in Germany and marveling at the Los Angeles skyline from the top of Mulholland Drive.

    While the pictures suggest that the 25-year-old is on some extended vacation — he is not. This is his life and job.

    Last year, when Schlappig’s lease ended, he packed his entire life into a few suitcases and started flying around the world full time, using his expert knowledge of airline reward programs to fly at practically no cost at all.

    “I’m very fortunate in that I do what I love,” Schlappig said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “An airplane is my bedroom. It’s my office, and it’s my playroom.”

    Schlappig is part of a community known as “Hobbyists,” who have been outsmarting the airlines on their own rewards programs for decades, using their frequent flyer statuses, credit card incentives and mistakes in airline ticketing algorithms to get them free tickets around the world.

    It’s a community New York-born Schlappig has been a part of since he was 13, when he discovered the Hobby website Flyer Talk and started learning the tricks of the trade on the site’s online discussion boards.

    Never having really fit in at school, Schlappig spent a lot of time online mastering the art of the Hobby and within a year started spending his weekend flying across the country on back-to-back flights, never even leaving the airport, to stack up thousands of frequent flyer miles.

    “It was an interesting hobby,” his dad Arno said. “I said, ‘Hey! Keep it up. It’s better than smoking pot’.”

    Schlappig attributes his parents surprisingly acceptance of his jet-setting hobby to the tragic death of his older brother Marc, who was killed in a jet-skiing accident at the age of 14.

    Schlappig was still in preschool when his older brother was hit by a drunk boater and died.

    “You know, in retrospect, they were crazy for letting me fly,” Schlappig said.

    “By the time it came around to me, the approach my mom had was, ‘Life is too short not to take up what you love’.”

    (SD-Agencies)