Challenge Accepted: I’m Going For TWO MILLION Miles With SAS Million Mile Challenge
Last month, I mused about whether I would go for the Million Mile Challenge via SAS EuroBonus. Some personal and professional matters needed to fall into place for me to do this and they now have, meaning the challenge is accepted and the trip is on. But I’m not going alone…I’ve decided to take my 8-year-old son Augustine with me on the trip, throwing in a whole extra layer of complexity…and fun.
SAS Million Mile Challenge Accepted
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out my post from a few weeks back where I outlined the SAS Million Mile challenge. Put simply, if you fly on 15 SkyTeam carriers and credit the flights to SAS, you’ll earn 1,000,000 EuroBonus miles. That’s a sweet deal…so sweet I’m doing a double or nothing and taking my son along so we can earn 2,000,000 miles.
I’m used to traveling alone, especially for these sorts of trips, but Augustine and I had such a wonderful time on our Caribbean cruise earlier this year that I strongly suspect he will do well on this trip too.
There’s a problem, though, with Augustine…school. He is off the entire Thanksgiving week, but we also are not willing to miss Thanksgiving with my family (family first, miles second…) and that means he’ll need to miss a week of school. Ideal? No. But he is second grade, so I do fall into the “travel is more educational” camp and we’ll take his claswork along to help him pass time on some of the longer flights.
I’m trying hard to limit this to one major trip around the world and then one trip to Mexico and back in which we can fly Aeromexico and Delta. That’s looking increasingly difficult with the time constraitns I am under, meaning we may have to make one trip to Asia and then a separate round-the-world trip with more focus on Europe.
Yes, I’ve already got a very solid idea of how this will look, but I wanted to seek your advice and insight as well, since Live And Let’s Fly readers often come back with excellent tips.
Here are my thoughts:
We are going to stay in economy class for most of this trip, if not all of it, so I can’t do eight overnight flights in a row…we are going to have to break it up just a little bit.
I have other professional obligations that require my daily attention, so this will not be a holiday – I need time to work each day, which means flights must have wi-fi or I need long layovers/overnights to get work done.
Ideally, I’d be able to introduce Augustine to some great cities and we could stay at various Hyatt hotels (even though I’ll lose my Globalist status next year).
The trip will necessarily include China Eastern and Xiamen Air, meaning we will need to travel through. Mainland China. I have a visa, but Augustine does not…but Chian does have a generous visa waiver for transit passengers.
Speaking of visas, I will get him a visa to Vietnam since we’ll need to fly Vietnam Airlines and I would love to return to the Park Hyatt Saigon (and also visit Hanoi for the first time, though I do not know if there will be time).
There are cheap Saudia fares out of Cairo and I definitely want to spend a day in Cairo so Augustine can see the pyramids and we can check out the recently-opened new Egyptian Museum.
Since we’ll be flying Garuda Indonesia, I’d love to spend a night or two in Jakarta or even take Augustine to Bali
I want to take a Fifth Freedom KLM flight.
As for European overnights, I’m thinking Madrid (Air Europa) and perhaps Bucharest (Tarom).
Ideally, we’d fly at least premium economy on the intercontinental segments, but I’m not willing to spend (all that) much more…and I think an economy class review would be a lot of fun for the blog.
I know SAS EuroBonus miles are not the most valuable, but I would argue they are valuable, especially if you fly SAS. We all tend to have flexibility in our schedule and having two million miles to put toward premium economy or business class redemptions will hopefully get us back and forth between the USA and Germany many times.
So yes, I’m doing this. And leaving soon, I hope.