Please help me win Frequent Miler’s Million Mile Madness 2024! Help me craft the winning path to 1 million miles and you can also win a great prize (prizes to be determined, but Greg says they’re going to great).
Million Mile Madness, indeed. I’m very excited about the prospect of designing a round-the-world itinerary to fly 15 SkyTeam airlines and earn 1 million SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) EuroBonus miles. As soon as I saw this promotion, I couldn’t wait to dig in and start trying to figure out the cheapest / fastest / best way to earn a million miles (and maybe see a new country or two along the way!).
Our new Million Mile Madness Challenge is going to come together fast — read full details of this challenge in the launch post: Start your (search) engines: You’re invited to Frequent Miler’s Million Mile Madness challenge. In short, Greg, Stephen, and I are competing to see who can (with reader help!) create the itinerary that has the most SAS — that’s Speed, Affordability, and Style. In this post, I am soliciting your help so that I can craft the winning Frequent Miler itinerary for this challenge — and you can be rewarded for your efforts. Each of us will select the reader who has been most helpful in creating our plans and that reader will win a prize — and a chance to win the grand prize. Again, more detail can be found in the launch post linked above and go to our full Million Mile Madness page for full challenge updates, including links to Greg and Stephen’s journal posts.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Constraints
- Home airport: New York City (EWR/JFK/LGA) or Boston (BOS) or Washington-Dulles (IAD). I a roughly similar distance to the New York City or Boston airports and positioning to Washington-Dulles is really easy for me. I could, of course, position anywhere else in the US with my miles as need be.
- Departure Date Constraints:
- Best: November 10th or later
- Earliest: November 4th
- Notes: I have tickets to a local theater production on November 9th. I could (and recognize that I may have to) miss this. If I can’t pull off the trip leaving November 10th or later, then I can leave as early as the 4th.
- Return Date: I must be home no later than November 23, but I’d like to not be gone for more than 2 weeks (and my preference is to push as close to 10 days as possible, though I recognize that logistics may dictate a few additional days).
- Restrictions: Relatively few. I don’t mind long days and I function well enough off of limited sleep. Bring it on. I’d rather avoid Greg’s 12-minute layovers if possible, but otherwise I’m fairly open.
Potentially Useful
- I do have a 10-year multi-entry visa for China. Those visas had been suspended during the pandemic, but were re-activated last year and I still have a couple years left on one I got a couple of years before the pandemic. I figured that this point might be relevant to know since we’ll have to fly both China Eastern and Xiamen Airlines and since there are some cheap flights into airports in China that may not offer transit visas.
- I don’t mind getting other visas as necessary, but keep the timeline in mind. We’re looking at closing submissions about a week or week and a half before travel commences. That might make turnaround time difficult on visas for some countries.
- Airline fee credits: I have a brand new Business Platinum and a few other Platinum cards with a total of $900 in airline incidental credits as well as a Hilton Aspire $50 credit to use. The Business Platinum credits would be easy enough to use for a flight booked through Delta. The $50 Aspire card credit should theoretically work when booking airfare directly with any airline or via Amex Travel.
- Amex Offers? We’ve recently seen offers for Virgin Atlantic and Air France. I’m not sure that either would be triggered by a complicated multi-carrier booking, but if I see one of these offers pop up, I might have to play with the search engine to see what I can do.
Qualifying Airlines
Here are the 16 airlines available for the promotion. Since I need to fly 15 of them, I can only leave 1 off the list:
- Qualifying airlines based in North America
- Aeromexico
- Delta
- Qualifying airlines based in Europe (primary hubs shown in parentheses)
- Air Europa (Madrid MAD)
- Air France (Paris CDG)
- KLM (Amsterdam AMS): KLM also has several 5th Freedom Flights entirely in Asia: KUL to Jakarta (CGK); SIN to Denpasar DPS; Taipei (TPE) to Manilla (MNL)
- SAS (Copenhagen CPH, Stockholm ARN, Oslo OSL)
- TAROM (Bucharest OTP)
- Virgin Atlantic (London LHR, Manchester MAN)
- Qualifying airlines based in Asia (primary hubs shown in parentheses)
- China Airlines (Taipei TPE)
- China Eastern (Shanghai PVG)
- Garuda Indonesia (Jakarta CGK)
- Korean Air (Seoul ICN, GMP)
- Vietnam Airlines (Ho Chi Min City SGN, Hanoi HAN)
- Xiamen Airlines (Xiamen XMN, Fuzhou FOC)
- Qualifying airlines based elsewhere (primary hubs shown in parentheses)
- Kenya Airways Nairobi (NBO): Note that Kenya Airways has a 5th freedom flight in Asia: Bangkok BKK to Guangzhou CAN
- Saudia Airlines (Riyad RUH, Jeddah JED)
My general thoughts so far . . .
I’ve got an idea in mind that I like, but I’m very much open to trashing this if a better plan materializes…
What I’d really like to do is combine Affordability and Style. Does that sound like an impossible combination? Here’s how: I’d like to try to find the 10 or 15 dirt-cheapest flights that meet the terms of the challenge (i.e. the cheapest flights that earn miles with SAS). I do not at all expect those flights to line up together — in fact, I expect that the cheapest flights, in at least some cases, will be very short. That’s great, because what I want to do is to try to piece together an ANA round-the-world itinerary that gets me to the places I need to go to pick up the cheap SkyTeam flights.
In other words, imagine that I fly United from San Francisco to Seoul and then hit some SkyTeam flights: Maybe I fly a sub-$100 fare to Beijing on Korean Airlines, then maybe a cheap China Eastern Airlines flight to Vietnam and a cheap domestic flight on Vietnam Airlines (all SkyTeam carriers) before I resume my ANA round-the-world with a Thai Airways business class award to Bangkok and on to Dubai where I can pick up Saudia to fly to . . . etc.
I’m just making that up, but I imagine it could be possible to put together a reasonable-enough round the world ticket that fills in the gaps to get to a bunch of cheap SkyTeam flights. This is a starting point for planning the trip, but not a must — if flying long-haul economy is the best way to connect the dots effectively, I’ll make do with Priority Pass and Plaza Premium lounges and cool excursions to get my “Style” points.
I also really love the idea of including interesting Fifth Freedom flights (which are flights that connect two airports outside of an airline’s home country). Australian Frequent Flyer has a list of Fifth Freedom routes that claims to be kept up-to-date (I haven’t thoroughly checked). I also subscribe to the full version of Flight Connections, which can help to make those easily identifiable.
If you’re interested in doing some searching, don’t forget that Google Flights can be a powerful tool in doing things like searching flights to an entire country or even continent. For example, see this screen shot from a search from Seoul, Korea to Asia, filtered to SkyTeam carriers and a cost of no more than $100:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Help! (and maybe win!)
I need your help! I don’t expect that one person will build the entire “perfect” itinerary, but I’ll take all the help I can get. Whether you construct the perfect way to hit all the European carriers in a single day or you tip me off to the cheapest route from Europe to Asia, I’ll take all the help I can get! Don’t feel like one person has to do it all.
The best way to contribute is by posting to the comments below. That way others can see what you’ve written and build from there. If you really want to email me, though, you can write to the Frequent Miler Mailbag here and make sure the subject heading directs the email to me. For example you could write the subject as “Nick: Million Mile Madness suggestions” (I suggest front-loading the name because I want to make sure I see that it’s for me even when looking at my email on a phone, where a long subject line is likely to get cut off).
Whoever I deem to be most helpful overall will be one of three selected winners. And if I win the challenge, you’ll get the grand prize (details TBD).
Let’s go!
The post Nick’s Million Mile Madness planning journal appeared first on Frequent Miler. Frequent Miler may receive compensation from CHASE. American Express, Capital One, or other partners.