Stack two deals, fly to Europe

Good morning from… Toronto! It’s my first time back in Canada in over eight months, which is weird.

But before I dive face-first into a bowl of poutine, let’s get yous guys up to speed on the travel world:

• ✈️ Flying Blue Promo Rewards (January 2025)

• 🌎 SAS Challenge Update (and giveaway announcement)

• 💳 Current Transfer Bonuses

✈️ Flying Blue Promo Rewards (January 2025)

The only real way to kick off a new year and a new month is with the best travel deal in the biz: Flying Blue’s monthly Promo Rewards.

If you aren’t up to speed, let me give you the lowdown:

Every month, Flying Blue (the points program for KLM and Air France) offers discounted rates for booking flights between the U.S. and Europe (and other regions).

As usual, this month’s list has a bunch of great deals for U.S. travelers in various cities from East to West:

Here are the deets:

For economy fares, you can fly between Europe and Phoenix, Miami, and Atlanta for just 15,000 miles one-way.

That’s a solid deal, especially for Phoenix, which is a bit further out.

Wait a minute… 20,000 miles? I thought it was supposed to be 15,000?

Oh yeah, here’s the other fun part:

None of this month’s promo rewards are showing up online as advertised. Fun, right?

So don’t go sending over miles yet. Instead, wait a few days until Flying Blue figures out how to operate a website, then pull the trigger.

Anyway, other highlights include flying from cities like New York and Chicago to Europe for just 26,250 miles in premium economy, which I think is an even better deal:

But here’s the best part…

There’s still a 20% transfer bonus going on from UR Points to Flying Blue until January 15th.

This means that the economy fares I mentioned are actually only 12,500 points, and the premium economy fares are just 21,900 UR Points.

21k points to get to Europe in premium economy is an EXCELLENT sweet spot, in my opinion.

You can rack up a lot of UR Points by getting a card like this one (my personal choice) or this one (the lower-tier card and fan favorite).

Having some points on hand will come in handy next time a deal like this rolls in, so I’d recommend hopping on a good offer to kickstart the year!

🌎 SAS Challenge Update (and giveaway announcement)

Now that the challenge is over, I’ve been recapping all of the experiences, things I’ve learned, and results… and I have a LOT to share with you.

So, in the first few weeks of the new year, I’ll be sharing tips, tricks, and other info that has resulted from this challenge.

Oh, and you’ll want to pay close attention… because in one of these segments, we’ll be giving away some of our million miles… to YOU! 😏

Anyway, today I want to answer some questions about the whole experience, starting with the biggest piece of news…

A couple of weeks ago, I received “the email” from SAS. I could explain it, but instead, I’ll just show you:

That’s right - they proactively reached out to confirm that, in fact, I completed the challenge and will earn one MILLION miles.

This was obviously a huge relief… I know many people have been sitting in limbo with this challenge and its various… challenges, so I feel very lucky to have had things go so well.

But aside from the million miles, what else resulted from this challenge? How many points did I earn from flying? Did I get elite status? How is the SAS program?

Well, I’ve got plenty of answers.

Aside from the million miles, what did I earn?

A handful of you reached out to ask how many points I earned from flying so many SkyTeam airlines.

After all, these all had to be cash bookings, so theoretically, flying more than 15 times should rack up quite a few miles…. Right?

Well, no.

In total, I earned 8,431 SAS points.

Practically speaking, that’s enough miles to book… nothing, actually. 🤷🏼‍♂️

In other words, SAS is not a great program for earning points - both with their own flights or partner airlines.

Some of my flights only earned like… 30 points, despite costing over $100.

SAS’s own flights (in short-haul economy) also earn a flat rate of 100 points per leg, which is pretty meh.

Did I earn any SkyTeam status from the challenge?

Not even CLOSE.

With SAS, there are two ways to earn status:

1. Fly a number of segments

2. Earn a number of points

Here are the four levels of status with SAS:

As you can see, Diamond is so cool that it doesn’t even need a fancy graphic like the rest of the tiers.

Anyway, before starting the challenge, I was actually looking at possibly going for Gold status for a few reasons:

• Since I had to fly about 20 segments for the challenge, I’d only be 25 away from Gold

• Since my membership year started in October, I’d have until October 2025 to earn 25 more segments, or just a couple segments a month after the challenge.

• SkyTeam Elite Plus offers great benefits.

Sadly, I quickly found out that only flights on SAS itself count toward this… womp womp womp.

So in the end, I only ended up with two “segments.”

The other way to earn status is through points. And this is the method that a lot of flyers used to earn status from this challenge.

As you can see from the graphic earlier, earning Gold status also requires 45,000 points.

So if you booked business-class or refundable economy fares for all of your flights, this is well within reach.

But in my research, I determined that it would be WAY more expensive to do this. For example, this is the flight I booked on Saudia Airlines:

Even though it was only a two-hour flight, it cost a lot for the cheapest fare.

For this $200+ purchase, I earned 251 SAS points. To book business class, it would’ve cost me $1,576, which is… comical…

But even if I did that, I still would’ve earned a grand total of… wait for it… 314 SAS points. 😑

On the other hand, I upgraded to business class on my Kenya Airways flight for just $130, which was a great deal.

And while this flight earned 1,309 SAS miles, it still just doesn’t really move the needle…

So all in all, SAS is not a great program on the earning side…

The REDEEMING side, however, is a different story… and it might surprise you. But you’ll have to stay tuned for the next update to learn about it. 😉

That’s all for today, folks!

It’s been a weird week only having two newsletters after such a long break… but I look forward to kicking off another year and another normal week on Monday.

Have a great weekend, and take care. ❤️

52°22'35.4"N 52°15'17.4"W