Why ‘super-commuters’ fly hundreds of miles to work

“When you live somewhere and you have an awesome life, there’s going to be a risk if you move somewhere else,” Nassirian said. “I know the quality of life [in Vancouver] will not be the same, just because of the cost of living.”

To solve that dilemma, Nassirian crunched the numbers. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada, with the average monthly living cost for a family estimated at more than C$5,000 (US$3,687, or £2,914). Even with approximately C$800 a month in air fares and C$2,450 to rent a small apartment in Vancouver, Nassirian said he was better off keeping his home in Edmonton.

“The equivalent house that I have in Edmonton would be four times that price, so you’re going from C$600,000 to a minimum of C$2.4 million,” he said, adding that the price of petrol, taxes and groceries were all significantly lower in Edmonton than Vancouver.

Nassirian, who also works in marketing for several companies in Edmonton, is far from the only one who has discovered that flying long distances to work or college can save money. Last year, the US student Bill Zhou’s Reddit post about the economics of his commute by plane from Los Angeles to attend classes at the University of California, Berkeley, went viral. And in June, the South Carolina resident Sophia Celentano revealed on TikTok that it was cheaper for her to fly from Charleston to her New Jersey internship than to rent in the area.

Sophia Celentano

Others make the choice for business reasons. Rob Biederman is a partner at the venture capital firm Asymmetric, and while he lives in Boston, other partners are in New York. He uses the Tailwind Seaplane service between the cities two or three times a week — often accompanied by Duke, his three-year-old golden doodle.

Duke and his owner make use of an effective means of travel

“On a Sunday night, I might go to bed not even knowing where I’m going to be for the rest of that week, just based on where the deals are,” he said. “Tailwind was extremely effective in helping me bridge that divide and be able to seemingly be in both cities at once.”

William Fulton, a fellow at Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, said there had been cycles of super-commuting over the past few decades. But he described a unique confluence of events that had created the conditions for today’s epic commutes. “One was the Covid work-from-home revolution, and the other one was an extreme rise in housing prices in the most desirable locations,” he said.

He cited people who moved to rural areas during the pandemic on the expectation that they could work from home for ever, only to find they were now required to be in the office from time to time.

“Will a large cohort of the workforce emerge that can work either entirely remotely or go to the office once or twice a month?” he asked. “Because if so, then you will see a lot more super-commuting.”

But he warned there was a chance of burnout for the super-commuter — something Curt von Badinski can relate to. From 2014 to 2019, Von Badinski commuted every day using a small private air service from his home in Los Angeles to his tech start-up in San Francisco. The gruelling days began at 5.15am and he would rarely get home before 9pm.

“I would highly advise against it,” said Von Badinski, who now commutes about an hour a day by car to his job as an architect at a defence contractor. “It is extremely wasteful. I don’t know what my carbon footprint was for those years, but it’s probably substantial… [and] from a mental health perspective, probably not the best.”

Megan Bearce, a therapist based in Minnesota, said it could also wear on a super-commuter’s family. In 2010, just after her family had relocated from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, her husband Ian was offered his dream job at a creative firm in New York.

Ian and Megan Bearce in Minneapolis

“It seemed like a huge opportunity for him, but we had just bought a house, our kids were little,” she said.

For more than a decade, Ian would fly to New York on a Monday morning, then return to the family on Thursday or Friday. In 2014, he made a time-lapse video of his commute, in which many sandwiches were consumed in airport lounges and many hours were logged on his laptop.

It was Covid-19 that put a stop to his super-commute in 2020 when he transitioned to working from home. He got a new job locally in 2022.

The experience led Megan to write a book about the phenomenon, Super Commuter Couples: Staying Together When A Job Keeps You Apart.

While she admits it can be tough, especially with young children, she said that coming up with coping strategies helped make it a positive experience overall.

“I was like, OK, here’s what we need to do: we need to prioritise our time together when we have it to make it about quality, because we don’t have the quantity,” she said. “And there are hidden perks. We had a bazillion miles on our airlines and got to take trips … [and] having an apartment in New York is pretty great.”

Nassirian also cites the quality time he spends with his children when he is at home as a perk of being a super-commuter. He does worry about his carbon footprint, but said he calculated that it would be even higher if he were living in an affordable town outside Vancouver and driving to work every day in his pick-up truck.

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But in the back of his mind, Nassirian knows he cannot have the best of both worlds indefinitely. He has been super-commuting for only about a year, but he senses that it has its limits and has been checking out housing prices in British Columbia.

“It works well — but is it for ever? I don’t know,” he said. “I think eventually I’m going to have to bite the bullet and move.”