Nick’s Million Mile Madness planning journal

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.

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)

Journal entries (newest to oldest)

Wednesday October 30, 2024

This challenge is, hands down, the most difficult one we’ve done to date. I’m sure it won’t look that way, but trust me: making this trip work has been far more difficult than I’d have ever imagined.

On the surface, this seems like a cool puzzle game: find the cheapest flights, connect the dots efficiently, and you’re done.

Ha!

On the contrary, I feel like I’ve been locked in a Saw-movie themed escape room for days, but also surrounded by walls covered with spirals and numbers a la Russel Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. While I initially thought that SAS was a little nutty in offering this promotion, I now realize that the only people who are likely to complete the challenge are those who can spend 3+ weeks traveling and who can devote many hours to researching qualifying flights. Somebody in the marketing department was several chess moves ahead of me in realizing how easy this would sound but how difficult it would be to execute.

I’ve documented a bit about the difficulty of finding flights that qualify based on operating carrier and fare class (and how difficult it can sometimes be to find a qualifying fare class). If you don’t know how to use ITA Matrix / how to recognize a fare basis code by finding the (sometimes buried) link to fare conditions and then sifting through unformatted text looking for it to appear anywhere in the long fare conditions document, you’re probably in for a world of pain.

I’ve not yet documented the challenge of scheduling. I rarely think much about schedules when booking trips because I’m not generally trying to thread the needle from one flight to the next. However, when you’re planning a multi-day multi-carrier trip where one of your primary goals is to get it done quickly, schedules suddenly matter a lot. That flight you saw departing at 8am every day? Just wait until you get a dozen flights laid out and you realize that the 8am departure goes every day except the one when you’re scheduled to arrive at that airport, so you’ll have to wait until a 9pm departure and arrive at the next city a day later than planned, breaking the rest of the itinerary entirely. Wait until that happens after you’ve already booked the preceding 12 flights and can’t change any of it. Ask me how I know about that. If you’re not meticulous, you’re in for a world of pain.

Speaking of being unable to change, never have I booked a trip with so much riding on each step of the booking process. As a primarily award traveler, I’ve become spoiled by the flexibility I usually enjoy — typically when I’m booking a trip, there’s no mistake that can’t be undone since most award tickets can be changed or cancelled cheaply enough (or even for free). Things are far different this time around since we are mostly booking nonrefundable cash fares — one mistaken date or time could throw off everything, particularly if the next several steps depend on it. I’ve got a spreadsheet with more than 20 tabs of different iterations of the trip. Despite being what I thought was meticulously careful about everything, I’ve still discovered mistakes a bunch of times (at one point, I thought I had it all figured out and I was ready to start booking everything only to count my carriers and realize that I had somehow completely forgotten to include one in the plan). If you book the wrong date or hour or miss a carrier or miss a flight, you’re in for a world of pain in figuring out how to backtrack.

And then there’s the timing / pace. I told Greg yesterday that I’m confident that I’m going to beat him on speed (perhaps not on time spent in the air, but at least on the number of days to complete the challenge). That’s not because I don’t think Greg is capable of planning an itinerary that is faster than mine. I know it is physically possible to plan even tighter connections in some places, but beyond the risk of super tight separate-ticket connections, at some point this becomes an exercise in pain tolerance. How many straight days of doing nothing but flying in an economy class seat can you handle in a row? Can you fly every single day for nearly two weeks? Enjoy 1am departures followed by an afternoon connection? If you answered yes, this game might be for you. My point though is that I know it is possible to complete the challenge faster than I will (and I think Stephen will probably beat me on speed), I don’t think Greg has a higher tolerance for a brutal pace of travel. At the same time, I know that this challenge would be easy if given 3 weeks to complete it. I can’t see Greg the Frequent Miler taking the easy way out, so I expect he will still finish in an impressive amount of time. I won’t beat him by more than a day or two — and maybe he’ll make me eat my words entirely. No matter what happens, I can pretty much guarantee that we’re all going to be wiped out when this thing ends between the pace of travel, the jet lag, etc.

And yet, all that said, we were all smiling and laughing about our shared experience with all of the above in our team meeting yesterday.

I had a college track & field coach who had been a Division I decathlete. When asked about training for the decathlon, his face lit up as he described how you have to be wired to enjoy the pain. I don’t doubt that he had that gene. I’ll always remember the day we were doing a workout that included twenty four 400m repeats on the track at one-mile pace with a minute of rest between each. We got about fifteen or sixteen 400’s into the workout (about 4 miles) and I started vomiting. When the timer went off to mark the end of that minute of rest, he looked at me and said, “Ok, you’re done throwing up. Now get back on the track”. That was probably the day when I realized that I didn’t have that spark for that particular pain. But after very little sleep for the past week and difficulty focusing on anything other than Million Mile Madness thanks to being obsessed with this challenge, I have to say that this is my kind of pain.

All of that meandering out of the way, here are some actual updates:

• As you can see in comments and may have heard on the podcast, I pretty quickly threw out the idea of the ANA round the world. Anish in the comments did an amazing job laying out almost an entire itinerary that included an ANA round the world, but I needed to tweak some other things and eventually realized that the round the world was just adding unnecessary complication to what is already pretty complicated.
• The above is not to say that I’m not using miles to add some pizazz and comfort to the trip.
• I’ve got flights for more than 75% of the trip booked at this point. Readers have been instrumentally helpful in the comments. If you’re thinking about trying to do this thing, I recommend spending some time in the comments.
• There’s one flight that I’m nervous isn’t going to credit properly, and it’s not going to be an easy save. I might be locked into 15 carriers without being able to miss any of them. I’m nervous!
• My connections are mostly pretty tight. I’ll have less time for sightseeing / doing stuff than planned, but I’m still up for recommendations for specific places where I’m likely to have time. I have a few hours in most of the carrier hubs, so if you have a hub-specific suggestion that isn’t far from the airport, let me know!
• I also have one stop up my sleeve that I’m betting won’t be on Greg or Stephen’s itinerary….and I’m pretty excited about it. Can’t share more detail yet, but I do have a little bit of style incoming during the back half of the trip.
• Since Hilton has generously provided 5 “Be My Guest” certificates to the reader who helps the winner of the challenge the most, I’m aiming to stay at Hilton properties whenever possible/practical as a way of saying thanks for giving the winner something awesome.

Here are some specific areas where I currently need help:

• I’m looking for a great restaurant recommendation in Bangkok. Realistically, I’ll probably only have about 3.5-4 hours between the time I walk out of the airport and the time I should be walking back in, but I would love to get a delicious Thai meal in that time. I love Thai curries (Panang curry and Massaman curry are my favorites, but I also love Thai Yellow/Green/Red curries). Can you point me to a great curry spot that won’t take too long to reach? Keep in mind that public transit from the airport to city center takes about an hour each way. A taxi might reach the city center in half that time, but that all depends on traffic. Closer to the airport is better, but I’m open to your recommendations!
• Do you have a can’t-miss recommendation for Bucharest? I’ll have a good chunk of a day here and I’ve never been to Bucharest. I haven’t done any research about what to do here yet. Glad to get a great recommendation for an activity / thing to see / activity to do.
• Is there a place to see dolphins in the sea within a short flight from Kuala Lumpur? I didn’t have “three trips to Kuala Lumpur” on my 2024 Bingo card. I currently have about 24 hours in Kuala Lumpur and since I did a little sightseeing there with Greg and Tim a couple of months ago, I’m leaning towards using that day to rest/recharge/get work done. However, during the team meeting yesterday, Carrie said she’d award extra style points if someone swims with dolphins. She of course meant wild dolphins in the sea — I’m not looking for a caged dolphin encounter type of experience, but something more like when I booked a snorkeling trip in Oman to see sea turtles during 3 cards 3 continents and ended up face-to-face with whale sharks! Or maybe I don’t need dolphins at all — but I know that Kuala Lumpur has a host of low-cost-carrier flights to nearby places for peanuts where I might be able to see the sea or do something cool. Again, I’m leaning towards just relaxing for the day in Kuala Lumpur, but I theoretically have enough time that I could fly somewhere else to spend the night if it’s a flight time of around an hour and there’s an early flight back to KUL early in the morning the next day. Thoughts? Psst — Langkawi won’t work. The first flight back to Kuala Lumpur in the morning is too late.

I will need more help with other things soon, but the above are next on my agenda to figure out. Now back to booking!

Friday October 18, 2024

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:

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!

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