Is the Turkish Airlines ‘one million miles for six continents’ challenge worth it?

SAS has a lot to answer for. After the huge success – at least in PR terms, although it cost SAS far more than expected – of the SAS Million Mile Challenge last autumn, other airlines have been jumping on the bandwagon.

The problem is that none of them has managed to create the same mix of variety, ingenuity and reward that SAS did when it wanted you to fly 15 different airlines, including a number of Chinese carriers.

Turkish Airlines is the latest to throw its hat in the ring. It will offer you 1,000,000 Miles&Smiles miles if you fly to all six continents by 27th October.

Let’s look at the details first.

Full details and rules are on the Turkish Airlines website here.

• You must book and travel between 27th June and 27th October

• All flights must hub through Turkey, which excludes some Fifth Freedom flights such as Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo which would have made the challenge a LOT easier

• You must fly to a destination in Africa, Asia (which includes the Middle East), Europe (excluding Turkish airports), North America, South America and Oceania (Australia is your only option)

• Note that ONLY the destination counts, so flying from New York to Sydney will only tick off the Oceania box, not the North America box

• Only cash tickets (economy or business) qualify – check the rules for the small print on what cash ticket types will not count

• All flights must be on Turkish Airlines – codeshares are excluded

• All flights must be credited to a Miles&Smiles account

• You will receive your bonus in early November

How much would it cost?

I’ve seen a few sample intineries online. Here’s an example from Flyertalk starting in Nuremberg (NUE airport code), of all places, for €3,000:

• NUE-IST-BEY (€322) – Asia
• BEY-IST-CAI (€403) – Africa
• CAI-IST-SYD (€536) Oceania
• Flying Blue redemption from Sydney to Jakarta
• CGK-IST-EWR (€629) North America
• JFK-FRA-NUE (€326) Lufthansa flight to return home for a break!
• NUE-IST-BOG-IST-NUE (€779) – South America, return ticket so ticks off Europe too

If you go to post #176 in this Flyertalk thread there is a business class itinerary for just under $11,000 from Istanbul.

Post #332 of the same thread has a sample itinerary from London, based on taking two separate trips a few weeks apart.

Turkish Airlines will status match you

Whilst the above itinerary is in economy, Turkish Airlines is known for being willing to status match elites from other alliances.

This would get you lounge access on your flights – including your many stopovers in Istanbul – and may even get you a mileage bonus on your flights too.

What are one million Miles&Smiles miles worth?

This is where we get to the big issue.

Miles&Smiles miles have a three year hard expiry. You MUST use your miles within three years of earning them.

This is easy if you are travelling in business class with a partner or family. It is a lot harder to blow a million miles in three years if you prefer to travel solo in economy.

Miles&Smiles redemptions are priced on a ‘per segment’ basis. As anywhere you go will require an aircraft change in Istanbul, this can push up the price compared to booking via other frequent flyer schemes.

Here is the reward chart and here is a calculator. London to Dubai via Istanbul is 170,000 miles return in business class (plus taxes and charges) at standard rates. London to San Francisco via Istanbul is a whopping 350,000 miles return in business class. Those one million miles won’t go as far as you think and will definitely get you less than our usual target of 1p each.

‘Promotional’ award seats are cheaper but are hard to find. Without those, rewards priced from the standard chart are toppy and that’s before you add the high taxes and charges.

Anecdotally (because I’ve never tried it myself) it is very hard to book Star Alliance partner flights via Miles&Smiles. It can’t be done online and the call centre has a reputation for being tricky to deal with. The IT system to allow partner bookings seems to be have been troublesome for many months ….

In general, it is not a mileage currency where you can be certain to get value. The general view on Flyertalk is that the only real value in the programme is for ticket upgrades. To quote one elite member of the Turkish programme:

I agree that the challenge doesn’t make sense if you’re starting from the scratch and you only do it with the aim of gaining some monetary value.

You CAN redeem for shopping gift cards

Here’s one interesting upside – the Miles&Smiles gift card website, which has a lot of UK options.

See here, for example – you can redeem miles for Amazon credit at 0.5p per mile.

Your 1 million bonus miles would get you £5,000 to spend at Amazon, and of course you’d also have the miles you will earn from the flights themselves. Plenty of other merchants are also available.

Travel in economy and you could get all your money back.

Conclusion

This challenge isn’t creating anything like the buzz online that SAS did. SAS was first, of course, but their challenge had the added ‘benefit’ of flying multiple different carriers and many people got a lot of pleasure out of stitching together an itinerary.

The Turkish one is less ‘fun’ to that extent, although arguably it’s a bit more sensible. Because each trip will go via Istanbul, it will take roughly the same number of flights to tick off six continents as it took to tick off 15 airlines for the SAS challenge.

There is also a view that the SAS miles are more valuable than a million Turkish Airlines miles – especially given the 3-year expiry and a bad track record for trashing the value in Miles&Smiles.

Of course, the bottom line is that – based on cashing out your miles for £5,000 of Amazon credit – you could get an amazing set of free trips around the world. This is because, if you price it right, you may get economy flights AND hotels, for short stays in cheap places, for around £5,000.

If you are interested in this, I strongly recommend that you read this very long (300 posts) Flyertalk thread which should cover any questions.

You can find out more on this page of the Turkish Airlines website.