Sinema’s Final Flight: Inside Her $200K Travel Spending Spree Before Leaving Congress

Senator Kyrsten Sinema is leaving office, and the avid traveler appears to have ramped up her trips before leaving Congress.

She is an American Airlines Executive Platinum member whose staff put out a 37 page memo on meeting her travel expectations. She likes room temperature bottled water available at all times (honestly, so do I). She likes a weekly hour-long massage. She wants to avoid flying Southwest though they’re a huge carrier in her home state. She “does not like to fly” and asks staffers to pick her preferred seats when she does.

And she has appeared to schedule fundraising events around marathons and triathlons she competes in so that her campaign can cover the travel costs. She tends to favor Ritz-Carltons. Seems clever! Except maybe not all of the travel categorized as being for a fundraiser involved any actual fundraising.

Now, in her last months in office, she has spent nicely out of her remaining campaign coffers to fund international travel and high-end meals, like $1,300 at Nobu Tokyo. While there she hiked Mount Fuji.

In the third quarter of this year, Sinema (I-Ariz.) spent roughly $216,000 on expenses related to travel — including trips to Japan and France — and another $152,000 on security, according to her latest campaign finance report.

In all, Sinema’s campaign spent $650,536 between July 1 and Sept. 30, far more than her other retiring peers in the upper chamber — such as Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), whose campaign listed $224,521 in spending and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), whose campaign shelled out $23,440.

Senator Sinema’s campaign still had about $5 million cash at the end of September. And it’s like Brewster’s Millions. She can spend it on travel, but can’t really use it to buy United’s Global Services with prepaid travel. And she probably can’t just spend it all on GHA Discovery Dollars to use on hotel stays later.

She can use the leftover money to create a political action committee, though, and use the fund for her ongoing (travel) expenses that way.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Atleast it was campaign money. Donald Trump used tax payer money for his travel. He paid millions to his own hotels and Mar a lago estate

  2. @ Don G — You seem to forget that the treasonist runnig for President again spent billions renting his own hotel rooms and flying an army of people back and forth to Florida to play golf constantly.

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