Challenge accepted.
When SAS EuroBonus launched a promotion last week to earn one million miles by flying 15 different SkyTeam airlines by the end of 2024, we knew we couldn’t resist it. Given Frequent Miler’s history of past challenges like 40K to Far Away, 3 Cards 3 Continents, and Flying by the Seat of our Points (among others), this SAS promotion is not just in our wheelhouse, it might as well be our wheelhouse. We knew it. Readers knew it. It’s about to be ON. And this time, readers have a chance to win. You are going to have the chance to help us design our itineraries, with the most helpful among you earning prizes. The audience member who is most instrumental in crafting the overall winning itinerary will win the grand prize.
Long time readers (very long time readers) may remember that back in 2013 Greg challenged himself to earn 1 million points & miles in 1 month (read more about that challenge here). He called that challenge Million Mile Madness. For this challenge we’re recycling the name, but we intend to each earn a million miles in far less than 1 month.
The SAS EuroBonus Million Mile promotion
If you’re not familiar with the SAS EuroBonus Millionaire promotion, see full details in our post: SAS Airlines will give you up to a million points to fly SkyTeam partners.
In short, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) recently joined the SkyTeam alliance. To raise awareness of their new alliance and partners, they are offering a promotion whereby SAS EuroBonus members can register and then earn bonus miles by flying paid tickets credited to SAS EuroBonus or award tickets booked using EuroBonus miles. The top tier of the promotion is the only one that yields enough miles to be worth chasing: fly 15 qualifying SkyTeam airlines before the end of 2024 and earn one million miles. These are the qualifying airlines:
- Aerolíneas Argentinas (but note that this won’t be integrated until sometime in December, possibly not soon enough for the promotion, so an award ticket might be the only way to include Aerolineas Argentinas — and none of us have existing SAS miles).
- AeroMexico
- Air Europa (integrating sometime this month; we intend to travel in November, so this should be on the table)
- Air France
- China Airlines
- China Eastern
- Delta Air Lines
- Garuda Indonesia
- Kenya Airways
- KLM
- Korean Air
- SAS
- SAUDIA
- TAROM
- Vietnam Airlines
- Virgin Atlantic
- Xiamen Air
Note that this list leaves out a few SkyTeam carriers that are not part of the promotion (ITA and Middle Eastern Airlines as well as Czech Airways, which is ending operations this month). And keep in mind that you either need to earn SAS EuroBonus miles for the flight (i.e. it needs to be a fare class eligible to earn miles) or redeem SAS EuroBonus miles for the flight.
The SAS promotion itself isn’t a contest. Anyone who registers and earns SAS miles from 15 different qualifying SkyTeam carriers (and/or uses EuroBonus miles to fly on those SkyTeam carriers) will earn one million miles. The promotion can be earned by everyone who completes it.
But rather than simply completing this challenge quietly and individually, we immediately saw an opportunity to turn SAS’s promotion into a team (and reader) challenge . . .
Frequent Miler’s Million Mile Madness 2024
For this challenge, Greg, Stephen, and I (Nick) will be competing against each other to design the itinerary with the most “SAS” possible that meets the terms of the promotion and earns us each a million miles. What do I mean by the most “SAS”? We’ll be judged on three core criteria:
- Speed: The faster you can complete the challenge and the least time in-flight the better.
- Affordability: Who can book the cheapest flights eligible to earn miles?
- Style: Fast and cheap is good. Fast, cheap, and in style is better.
However, rather than working independently on this, we wanted to pool the resources and expertise of our Frequent Miler audience. This is where you come in, along with your chance to win!
Later today, Greg, Stephen, and I will each publish a “journal” post where we will list our individual parameters / restrictions. For instance, we have a window in November 2024 within which we will all travel, but we each have slightly different date availability, starting cities and other requirements. Stephen is a UK citizen, so visa considerations may be different for him. We’ll detail our own personal criteria, restrictions, and goals in those posts (and the three of us don’t intend to take ideas from another contestant’s post for the purposes of planning).
We want your help in crafting itineraries. With the need to design an itinerary that includes fifteen different airlines, there are what feels like an infinite number of ways to tackle this challenge. We want reader input: in the comments of our individual posts, we want you to share proposed itineraries, tips about cheap flights, fifth freedom flights, things we should do during our (very short) stops along the way, etc.
The most helpful among you will be rewarded for your efforts. Each of us will select the reader / listener / audience member who has been most helpful in crafting our ultimate trip. To be clear, I imagine that it will be unlikely that a reader will propose the exact itinerary that one of us will fly — I expect there will be some element of tweaking no matter what, hence why we’re leaving it open to selecting the most helpful reader. Hopefully, this also encourages collaboration between readers. You’ll be able to comment on our individual planning / journal posts starting later today. In those posts, we’ll also list other ways to contact us (via email, Instagram DM, etc).
At the end of the competition, Tim, Carrie, and you (the Frequent Miler audience) will together select which Frequent Miler team member did the best job in completing the Million Mile Challenge with the most SAS. The reader selected as the most helpful in crafting that itinerary will win a grand prize.
Prizes are to be announced soon.
When is this happening?
We’ll be kicking off our individual planning posts later today. All of us will travel in mid-November, though not necessarily all on the same set of dates. We will be taking suggestions / reader submissions until Friday, October 25th.
We will hold a special Youtube Live on Tuesday, October 29th where will each announce the itinerary that we’ve booked. Then, in November, you’ll be able to follow along live on Instagram, Youtube, and here on the blog as we each traverse the globe on our individual quests to earn one million miles and help our reader win the challenge.
What are 1,000,000 SAS miles worth?
A reasonable question from the get-go may be this: Is it worth pursuing one million SAS miles through this promotion?
The short answer is that no, it probably isn’t for most people. For starters, you have to fly 15 different airlines — and if you don’t have SAS miles, it’s going to cost you a bundle of cash to book those flights. Then there is the very real time cost — given the geographic distribution of airlines, I expect this will take at least one week and likely more like 10 to 14 days. I imagine that relatively few people will pursue the top end of this promotion.
That said, if you’re looking for a number, I would say that most airline miles are worth somewhere between 1 cent and 2 cents per mile depending on how you use them. That would put the value of one million miles at something between $10,000 and $20,000. As a point of context, business class awards between North America and Europe on SAS cost 50,000 miles each way or the same routing on SkyTeam partners costs 78,000 miles one-way or 130,000 miles round trip. With a million miles, you’d have enough for 10 round trip business class tickets to Europe on SAS or 7.5 on SkyTeam partners.
Have tips for us?
We’re looking forward to reader help! As noted above, the most helpful readers will be rewarded for their efforts. Leave your tips in our journal / planning posts — click the images below to go to each one.
Greg
Stephen
Nick
If you’d rather reach out privately, you can send an email to our Mailbag here – put the name of the contestant in the subject line and the words “Million Mile Madness” to make sure that the right person sees the tip and the rest of us will know it’s not for us.
Looking for the latest details?
Subscribe to emails for all Frequent Miler updates, but head over to millionmilemadness.com for the latest updates on this challenge, including links to our journal posts as they go live, links to find us on social media when we begin traveling, and more.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
I just want to see someone pull off the Citi to Choice (1:2), then Choice to Radisson (1:2), then Radisson to SAS (7:1) for the 7:4 Citi to SAS transfer for a sweet business class for cheap on points.
I’d love to see that, too, but mostly for a different reason: they would have to also show us their time machine. Radisson Americas no longer exists, so there is no Choice to Radisson transfer anymore and hasn’t been for more than a year. So the only way to execute this transfer would be winding back the clock!
Sounds like FOG has a real leg up on this challenge….The one way from RT on these airlines would make it a faster trip??
As soon as I read your post about this SAS contest I figured you guys would be all over it. So glad to have the fun “audience” input. Question: In the “real” challenge – if I were to do it for myself – do the flights have to be booked through SAS? So you use your SAS rewards number on whatever metal airline to get the award miles?
You don’t have to (and probably can’t) book all the flights through SAS (that would probably be impossible for paid tickets with any airline — as an unrelated-to-this-challenge but similar type of example, American Airlines and Japan Airlines are partners and you could book an *award ticket* from Tokyo to Bangkok on Japan Airlines through the AA site, but you couldn’t book a *cash* ticket on that route through AA).
So yes, you need to credit your flights to SAS (use your SAS EuroBonus number on all of the tickets). In some cases, you may not be able to enter your SAS EuroBonus number, so you’ll have to submit the boarding pass to SAS for retroactive credit.
So, to be clear, you’d be flying paid (cash) tickets for this. Award flights only qualify if you book them with SAS miles and there aren’t any easy ways to get SAS miles, so you’d basically only be doing that if you earn miles through this promo and then use them.
Several questions on the challenge
The tickets either need to earn SAS miles OR to use SAS miles, so SAS-issued awards would qualify. But they don’t have any transfer partners.
I’m guessing that they only legs you’ll see NOT in economy are instrument-based upgrades, very short paid segments in Europe, or longer segments paid with Chase or Amex points at 1.5 cents per point. But almost everything in Y
Yes that’s what I thought, but the article says award tickets and since SAS miles are not easy to get (transfer) I was lost.
Thanks for the clarification
Was going to mention the travel portals as the only real points opportunities. AMEX is mostly going to be limited to Delta codeshares booked with the Business Platinum rebate but it could cover at least some flights with MR points.
Jayson, if I pay for one ticket using a combo of cash and awards, maybe that will meet the metal airlines threshhold for issuing awards?
As others have said, the promotion requires that you earn or use SAS EuroBonus miles for the flights to qualify. I expect most / all of the 15 qualifying flights to be flown in economy class.
However, they don’t necessarily have to all line up — we could use our own miles to connect dots. For instance, we could fly around Europe on SkyTeam in economy class to get legs on Air France, KLM, Air Europa, and TAROM but then use a completely separate award flight on Thai Airways using United miles to get to Bangkok and then fly paid SkyTeam flights on Vietnam Airlines, China Eastern, Xiamen, China Airlines, Korean, and Garuda. In other words, we can add other flights to get from place to place, but yes the 15 that earn us the million miles will likely need to be paid. I mean, maybe we’ll earn enough SAS miles on the first 5 or 10 flights or whatever to book an award ticket for some other part of the trip — but you can’t use like Flying Blue miles or Delta SkyMiles or whatever to book an award (or you could I guess, but it wouldn’t help you earn the million miles).
Can we help multiple players or do we have to declare a “team”? Can one helper be chosen as the most helpful by more than one player?
Yes, you can help multiple players, but we’ll make sure that we each select a different “most helpful” helper in order to give three people a shot at winning the grand prize. I suppose that means you’ll want to strategically help one of us more than the others :-).
Indeed, P1’s most helpful helper might be the one who stranded P2 and P3 in Vanuatu for a week.
So exciting! Check out the thread on Flyertalk.
Watch out for qualifying fare classes. Most partners this hasn’t been an issue, but Xiamen is very expensive to get into a mileage earning fare, and TAROM’s cheapest tickets also don’t earn miles (I got around that by booking as an AF codeshare)
And make sure you register for the promo!
Not sure if this is very helpful, but playing around with flight connections, found this initial draft of possible route with 15 airlines. I have not checked the price or award availability, but hopefully could be a good starting point for someone wanting to go more “deep”:
Ps:I started with DTW, but it can easily be replaced by Delta in the end for a MEX-JFK.
SAS doesn’t start flying to OTP until April.
That is a good point that I missed while searching. The european piece needs to be shuffled around, which is not that hard due to the several options with them.
TY for the airport codes.
I am SO excited you guys are doing this! Challenges are part of Frequent Miler’s DNA now. I’ve found that your most helpful advice has come from these challenges.
I love this community! Thanks for being great educators and encouraging others to share their knowledge as well. I look forward to learning a few things and following along on your inspirational adventures. Happy and safe travels everyone! (I would love to participate but as a noobie, I can’t compete with all the knowledge the veterans hold) Will there be a most improved points/miles hobbiest award?
This is wild. In another time (a few years ago before having a child, or last year during our parental leave sabbatical) I would have been all over this. Excited to live vicariously through reading about it though.
Love this can’t wait to watch. I just recently finished 40k to far away on YouTube.
I’d probably put in your Chinese Visa application if you don’t already have a 10 yr visa. 😉
I do have one, but given the need to finish the challenge relatively quickly, I assume we’re all unlikely to stay beyond the 24/72/144hr transit rules allow, so I’m not sure it’ll be necessary to have a visa. Time will tell!
Yes, technically you could get by on the transit visa if you plan appropriately but in practice it will avoid arguments with airline staff at check in and sometimes in immigration where english is limited. Good luck on the challenge!
Matt – no visa needed if just a layover and you do not leave airport.
It’s an important concern to note, but quite manageable without purchasing a visa.
The key to avoiding China TWOV-related staff issues is being well-prepared, as most horror stories involve an element of carelessness. Before each trip, I make certain to enter the nitty-gritty details (country/territory A > PRC > country/territory B) into a TIMATIC engine, and physically print out the resulting immigration requirements list so that if necessary, I am able to demonstrate that my itinerary qualifies according to the system all airlines use to verify compliance with immigration policy.
Also the 10 yr visa will open up options for more flight options as the transit visa is limited to certain airports.
I think at least one of the MU and Xiamen flights are going to have to be domestic for any kind of an efficiency play here – so unless you’re going to drop one of the two for Kenya Airways instead a domestic China segment is going to require the visa.
I have had great success with 144hr transit rule for family of 6 to go on a royal carribbean cruise this past summer. However, it took the custom agent supervisor at PVG like 1 hour to get us visa-free transit stamped because he was the only one allowed to do it after the intiial custom agent didnt understand the process. Take into account the custom line was not long when we arrived, but it could be for others so anticipate maybe 1-2 hours at custom.