Last month, SAS Airlines jumped ship from Star Alliance to SkyTeam, a move widely anticipated after Air France purchased a stake in the company. This month, SAS is celebrating the new alliance in a unique and pretty intriguing way.
Until the end of 2024, SAS is giving its members bonus points for flying SkyTeam partners and crediting the flights to the their SAS number. Paid and award flights that are booked with SAS EuroBonus points both count towards the promotion and the top level, which requires you to fly 15 different SkyTeam airlines, awards 1 million bonus points.
East Coast to Europe in business using EuroBonus points starts at 50K each way, so 1,000,000 points would potentially be enough for 10 roundtrip business class flights to Europe.
The Deal
- SAS has a “Eurobonus” promotion that awards bonuses for flying SkyTeam partner airlines and crediting the flights to SAS according to the following tiers:
- Fly 5 different partners – earn 10,000 bonus points
- Fly 10 different partners – earn 100,000 bonus points
- Fly 15 different partners – earn 1,000,000 bonus points
- All flight must be completed by 12/31/24
- Retroactive submission of any flights must be completed by 12/20/24
Terms and Conditions
- For the flight to count, EuroBonus points must be earned on or used to pay for the flight.
- You will be rewarded Bonus points (not Level points).
- In case of retroactive registration of a flight, it has to be submitted by December 20, 2024.
- Both regular and award trips (paid with points) count.
- It is the operating carrier that counts.
- If you book a flight where one segment is with e.g. SAS and the other with e.g. Delta, it counts as two partners for the challenge.
- You will be notified of the outcome in January 2025.
Quick Thoughts
This is one that’s calling out to digital nomads and/or gamers with plenty of time. Currently, there are 17 total airlines that are eligible for the promotion:
- Aerolineas Argentinas
- Aeromexico
- Air Europa
- Air France
- China Airlines
- China Eastern
- Delta
- Garuda Indonesia
- Kenya Airways
- KLM
- Korean Air
- Saudia
- SAS
- TAROM
- Vietnam Airlines
- Virgin Atlantic
- Xiamen Airlines
In order to complete the promo, you’d have to fly all but two of them. Only the operating carrier counts, so if you booked a flight that had one leg on Delta metal and one on SAS, it would count as two partners towards the promo.
Miles Earn and Burn estimated that it would cost somewhere between $1,125 – $5,000 to pull off all fifteen flights, assuming that you don’t book some of them using SAS points. However, let’s say it takes you $5K to do it. If you used all of the resulting 1 million points to book business class flights to Europe at 50K each, you’d be effectively spending $250 for each one. That’s a solid deal.
Of course, the main limiting factor is the time involved. Having to fly 15 different carriers across the US, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia will take some time. Could it be done in ~2.5 months between now and the end of December? Absolutely. But it will probably take a week or two, if you did it without taking any time to explore where you’d be flying.
Fifth freedom routes, where an airline operates between two countries that aren’t the its home base, could make this much, much easier. For instance, KLM flies a short between Buenos Aires and Santiago, while Virgin Atlantic flies a few shorts hops in the Caribbean. Australian Frequent Flyer maintains a great list of all/most global fifth freedom routes that’s worth checking out for anyone that’s considering taking the Scandinavian plunge.
Is this promo worth doing? For 99.95% of the world, absolutely not. But for folks with the time, inclination and sense of adventure, this could be a fantastic way to spend a month or two and up with quite a stash of useful points as part of the bargain.
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ITA, MEA and CSA are excluded entirely from the promo.
Aerolineas Argentina only counts for the promo if you redeem SAS points for an Aerolineas Argentinas flight. Same restriction for Air Europa.
And for the rest of the current Skyteam member airlines, you have to make sure the tickets are either SAS mileage earning or are booked using SAS points.
A lot of the SkyTeam airlines still have problems with loading in SAS frequent flyer numbers, and even us SAS elites are still trying to figure out whether we just enter the numbers or if we also have to enter in EBD/EBG/EBS in order to get the frequent flyer numbers into the booking and to show on the boarding passes.
And the deadline to seek missing mileage credit is December 20, even as flights up to December 31 count. That is one messed up restriction.
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days, but I almost gave up when I looked up the Kenya Airways BKK-CAN 5th freedom flight and could not find it. Kenya Airways has even removed BKK from their website. If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know. I don’t see flying Aerolineas right now, so it means including Kenya or Saudi. I don’t see how $1125 would be even close to possible. I’m thinking at least $3K even with being extremely flexible and having some non-rev benefits that would enable me to skip some long haul flying as part of the challenge.
You guys absolutely need to do this as one of your competitions. 100% you do!
I can’t think of a better promotion for at least one member of the FM team to take advantage of!
Travel-Dealz was nice enough to give us a sample routing: https://travel-dealz.com/deal/sas-eurobonus-million/
You could hit a single segment on all the Europeans carriers in 2 days easily if you wanted to, and probably 3 days for the asian carriers. Add in a single domestic delta leg and getting between Europe and Asia, and you’re finished. I think this could be done rather easily in a week, 2 weeks if you spent a few days here and there along the way.
This would make a great FM challenge! Judge on who is fastest, cheapest, and most creative/luxurious.
I agree, would be interesting to be done by Nick, Greg, and Tim