This week, Greg, Tim, and I have been crisscrossing the planet on our 2024 Frequent Miler team challenge. If you haven’t been following on Instagram, see the post below about how to follow. Read on for more updates from our week on the road and find easy links in the table of contents below if you’re after the podcasts or more from this week at Frequent Miler.
This week on the Frequent Miler blog…
How to follow our challenges on Instagram!
I’d never been much into Instagram until we started doing these challenges. I love the blog and it will always be our main source of content, but there just isn’t a better way to share a travel story as it is happening than via Instagram stories and reels. Carrie has been knocking it out of the park in putting together our footage to tell you the story in close to real-time as it unfolds. This post explains how to use Instagram — because the main shortcoming (in my opinion) is that it isn’t intuitive. So if you’ve never used Instagram before, this post is a must-read before you dive in over there.
Live Steams
Stage 1 Challenge Destination: LAX! (Last Minute Travel Challenge)
On Monday night, we found out that we had to book it to Los Angeles and find food that we thought would represent the country to which we’d each be sent for our international divergence.
Judging
The following two posts are where Stephen and Carrie break down how they scored our attempts to use our knowledge of miles and points to dive in and book our travels by the seat of our points.
Judging Stage 1 of the Flying by the Seat of our Points Challenge
Judging Stage 2 of the Flying by the Seat of our Points Challenge
Contestant reporting
Tim, Greg, and I continue to update our journal posts, so if you’d like to follow along on the blog with a less visual and more written summary of what we’ve done, you can follow each of our entries. The latest entry is at the top on each one with previous entries following it in chronological order (see the table of contents for quick links if you want to jump around).
Lufthansa Business: Pretty Fly for a Tall Guy (Tim’s Flying by the Seat of our Points Journal)
A quick LA turnaround turns into a lot of striking out (Nick’s Flying by the Seat of our Points Journal)
Sauntering in style to Croatia (Greg’s Flying by the Seat of our Points Journal)
Podcasts
Podcast: Our worst travel challenge moments | Coffee Break Ep13 | 6-4-24
We’ve thoroughly enjoyed our annual challenges at Frequent Miler (and plenty of readers have reached out to let us know that you enjoy them also — thanks for that!), but not everything has gone according to plan. In this week’s coffee break, Greg and I revisit some of the lowlights of previous travel challenges — though I think you’ll agree that even those lowlight moments were part of the fun!
Catching up with the Last Minute Travel Challenge | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep 258 | 6-7-24
This week’s Frequent Miler on the Air episode is a bit different than usual: Carrie put together pieces of our live streams to make this week’s show since Greg and I have been galivanting around the world competing in the challenge itself. If you’ve missed the streams, listening in to the podcast would be a great way to catch up.
Check out Greg and Nick’s podcast guest appearances with Chris Hutchins
Greg and I have recently done a couple of guest appearances on All the Hacks with Chris Hutchins. Chris is a big time miles and points guy whose show delves into tons of different “life hacks”, but Greg and I each weighed in on leveraging award travel on recent episodes. Read more about them and find links to listen in this post.
Other blog news
Bumped from Business Class (and a Lufthansa A340-300 Premium Economy review)
Greg was booked on Lufthansa in business class on his way home from Europe last week…but instead he got the unexpected opportunity to review Lufthansa Premium Economy when there was an aircraft swap that left him involuntarily bumped out of business class. This just doesn’t seem right — if it happened to my family of four, we’d be more than a little bit unhappy. I hope he follows up and posts the results so that others know what to do should this happen to them.
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My only complaint, if that, is that they all have the top tier statuses with all programs so much easier to upgrade and have better experiences. Most of us do not have top tier with every program.
I haven’t seen Greg’s new Delft blue house yet!
The only contest at FM that I enjoyed reading was when Greg’s mission was to get to a million miles in a month. This was of course was when a million miles were tough to get, maybe ten years ago.
I would rather get get your normal daily
content to read.
IMHO
Just one man’s opinion.
Personally, I love the competitions and they’re what I learn the most from. Iyf be happy if they did them several times a year (not suggesting that as a feasible idea).
I’ve liked each annual challenge better and better. The current one is really great. Normal content will always be around, and it can get repetitive and sometimes a little boring over the years, so this is a refreshing change of pace imo