Buenos días everyone! As you may know, a couple of weeks ago Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) announced a new promotion to celebrate their transition from Star Alliance to SkyTeam. For flights between October 8 and December 31, they will give you bonus miles for flying SAS and its new partner airlines, as follows:

• Fly 5 airlines, get 10,000 bonus miles
• Fly 10 airlines, get 100,000 bonus miles
• Fly 15 airlines, get 1,000,000 bonus miles

As soon as this promotion was announced, I started talking with friends and quickly decided I had to do it. There are a couple of important caveats: not all SkyTeam members are eligible (ITA, MEA, and the near-defunct Czech Airlines are not SAS partners), flights have to either earn SAS miles or be booked with SAS miles, and although the promo technically goes until the end of December, they won’t accept retroactive mileage claims filed after December 20th if the flight doesn’t post automatically, and you have to wait 8 days after your flight to submit a claim – so really you want to have all your flights finished by December 12 at the latest.

I needed a couple of tries to get the dates and routing sorted out as I figured out all these pieces, but here’s what I ended up with:

• Day 0: AeroMexico Mexico City–Chicago for Chicago Seminars (this is a few weeks before the rest of the flights)
• Day 1: American flight Washington-New York
• Day 2: Virgin Atlantic flight New York-London
• Day 3: KLM flights London-Amsterdam-Madrid, Air Europa flight Madrid-Barcelona, SAS flight Barcelona-Copenhagen
• Day 4: Air France flight Copenhagen-Paris, TAROM flight Paris-Bucharest
• Day 7: Wizz Air flight Bucharest-Jeddah (positioning flight, not part of the promo)
• Day 10: Saudia flight Jeddah-Madinah
• Day 11: Garuda Indonesia flight Madinah-Jakarta (booked with Flying Blue miles, not part of the promo)
• Day 12: Garuda flight Jakarta-Kuala Lumpur, VietJet or Malaysia flight Kuala Lumpur-Ho Chi Minh City
• Day 16: Vietnam Airlines flight Ho Chi Minh City–Bangkok
• Day 17: Kenya Airways flight Bangkok–Guangzhou
• Day 19: Xiamen flight Guangzhou–Fuzhou
• Day 21: Xiamen flight Fuzhou–Seoul
• Day 22: Korean flight Seoul–Qingdao, China Eastern flight Qingdao–Shanghai, China Airlines flight Shanghai–Taipei
• Day 24: EVA flight Taipei–San Francisco, United flight San Francisco–Denver
• Day 25 (shh): United flight Denver–Hartford
• Day 28 (?): Delta flight Boston-Washington

My planning process

I was pretty sure the easiest way to get a reasonably priced Virgin Atlantic flight was going to be a one-way economy ticket from New York to London, so I started there and began sketching out a general plan. I knew I didn’t want to just power through and exhaust myself without getting to actually see anything, so I decided to use this as an excuse to spend a bit of time in some cities I haven’t been to yet.

Two of the qualifying airlines – TAROM and Vietnam – are based in places I’m interested in but haven’t visited, so I knew I wanted to spend a few days in each. I’ve never really thought about visiting Saudi Arabia, but since I’d have to go there to get a flight on Saudia I figured I might as well spend a few days there as well. And it quickly became clear that getting Kenya Airways (with their fifth freedom flight from Bangkok to Guangzhou) and Xiamen Airlines would involve going through cities in China that I haven’t visited, so I decided to spend a couple of days in each too.

From there I sketched out a rough itinerary: fly Virgin to London, quickly hop around Europe to pick up the European airlines, wander leisurely from Romania to Vietnam, spend a week or so bouncing across China/Taiwan/Korea, and then make my way back to the US from there.

As noted above, each flight has to either earn SAS EuroBonus miles or be an award flight booked with EuroBonus miles – and SAS doesn’t (yet?) have any US transfer partners, so I’m stuck booking cash tickets for this. While I’m fine doing most of it in economy, I wanted to book business class for at least two of the long-haul segments (getting to and from Asia).

Locking in dates and booking

The hardest part of the planning process was finding business class award space to get back to the US. After spending the better part of a day searching, I finally found two options on EVA that could only be booked through their own InfinityMiles program. I transferred 75,000 Citi ThankYou points to my EVA account, set a Balance Check on AwardWallet so I would get notified ASAP when the miles arrived, and then waited anxiously for three days for the miles to post to my account. Fortunately nobody else snagged the flight I wanted, so I was able to book that and then begin working backwards from there.

I spent far too much time between Google Flights Explore and ITA Matrix trying to figure out the right combination of price and geographic logic. For example, at one point I was planning to do Guangzhou–Seoul–Shanghai–Hong Kong–Taipei, but I eventually discovered that I could cut out that backtracking and keep the overall price pretty much the same by picking up a domestic connection in China instead – while Shanghai–Taipei is more expensive than Hong Kong–Taipei, that was offset by cost savings from going Seoul–Qingdao–Shanghai instead of Seoul–Shanghai–Hong Kong.

I also was at one point going to fly to Tunis because there are cheap business class fares from Tunisia to Asia on Saudia, but that was going to require a huge amount of backtracking from Romania – and adding a stopover increased the price by a couple hundred dollars, making it a less compelling option. I ultimately decided to leave Bucharest a day early so I could take a nonstop Wizz Air flight to Jeddah instead.

Visas

As a US passport holder I’m incredibly privileged to not require visas to transit or even enter most places, but there are a few pieces of this trip that have visa requirements. Luckily I still have a valid Chinese visa that I got at the San Francisco consulate in 2016, so the only countries on my itinerary that I have to get visas for are Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. (Indonesia also requires an e-visa for entry, but I won’t be leaving the airport.)

Getting a Saudi transit visa has thus far been less straightforward than I thought it would be – while you can get an e-visa issued more or less automatically if booking a single ticket on Saudia (or Flynas), obtaining one on separate tickets requires applying online yourself through a glitchy website, and despite being an e-visa it’s apparently also going to require a trip to a Saudi embassy or consulate. I’ll keep you posted on that front…worst case scenario I can apply for a tourist visa online or on arrival, though that’s a bit more expensive.

The Vietnam e-visa website is also glitchy and took me a couple of tries, but it’s processing now and should hopefully be issued in the next day or two.

How much does all this cost?

I haven’t quite figured out how I want to account for everything (since for example some of the flights replaced others that I was going to take anyway), but at this point I’m looking at roughly $3100 in cash tickets ($900 or so of which was booked with the American Express Business Platinum 35% rebate) and 133,500 points for award flights. The baseline estimated value of 1 million EuroBonus miles is $10,000 so even after paying for hotels (which are fairly inexpensive in most places I’m staying) I should still come out significantly ahead – plus it’ll be a fun adventure.

What’s next

My trip starts in a little under three weeks, so let me know if you have recommendations – especially in Bucharest, Jeddah, Madinah, Guangzhou, or Fuzhou. And I’m planning to share my progress, so let me know what questions you have and what you want to see along the way.

And if you’re coming to Chicago Seminars this weekend, there’ll be at least two discussions about it: I’ll be speaking Friday night with 2-3 other folks, and Greg from Frequent Miler will talk on Sunday about the trips that he and his team are planning. Hope to see you there!