My former award booking partner Steve (some of you know him as “beaubo” on Flyertalk) literally wrote the book on 30 years of leveraging the biggest miles and points exploits.
One lesson he always reminds me is that if it’s a good deal, you should think about how it might scale. And right now Scandinavian is offering 1 million miles for flying on 15 different SkyTeam airlines. You can redeem most long haul destinations on their flights for 50,000 miles in business class, with no fuel surcharges. So 1 million miles is pretty good.
- The hard thing here isn’t making an itinerary work! That can be done for a few thousand dollars.
- It’s the time it takes to do all of this travel if you weren’t doing that anyway
- And of course there’s a risk that an itinerary falls apart.
Someone willing to take on a little bit of risk can arbitrage the first and second problems by finding other people willing to do the travel and funding it. That person is Steve.
His idea is to look for some folks willing to travel. He’ll fund the travel and he will follow all of the rules of the programs on mileage earning and redemption. So if you’d like a ‘free’ set of round the world flights, it’ll be worth connecting with Steve. You just won’t use the miles yourself. He buys the ticket like an employer might, you do the travel.
- You can start and end travel from your hometown
- Must travel between Nov 1- Dec 16
- He covers air, you are responsible for food, lodging, local activities, visas, etc.
- 9-10 days worth of flying, only 3 flights more than 8 hours
- You decide duration of total trip within the date range, as well as duration of stopover (if any) at each destination
- You must be from a country that allows transiting through China for less than 24 hours
- You will not be asked to carry, deliver or pick up any items
Flying 100% of the routing and within the time window are crucial. The deadline to commit to participating will be November 1. Just reach out to steve -at- bookyouraward.com or WhatsApp +12163468788.
Cool idea. Sounds like the tickets are for solo travel? I must say, solo leisure travelers tend to be losers. I’m not saying every solo leisure traveler is a loser — I’m just saying the likable sociable people tend to travel with friends.
I’m not a loser, and I’m not inclined to take up Steve’s offer. However, there are certainly a large number of losers who read this blog. I hope they have fun onboard flights where everyone else is having a good time traveling with their loved ones and they’re just flying “free” by themselves, checking into a hotel they have to pay for out of pocket by themselves, etc….
I might have been up for this were I not already spending most of November on cruises in Europe.
Starting from Atlanta where I live, I think the North American airlines could be done on a Mexico-Argentina trip followed by Air France to Europe. Then a few shorter intra-Europe flights to pick up SAS/Air Europa/Virgin//KLM/Tarom The combination of the others likely depends on which 2 to drop (Saudia, Kenya?). Return to US via Korean and Delta.
One other comment.
This is an extremely busy time of year for everybody with a serious occupation, student or professional. Students are busy wrapping up the semester. Professionals are busy wrapping up Q4 and planning for Q1 2025 and beyond. Just furthers my point above that losers will be traveling on Steve’s dime.
Put me down for 2 pax, me and wife!
Doesn’t this constitute selling miles or some other egregious violation of terms?
SFO/EWR, you are just the worst, most insufferable Karen. Everything you say is misinformed and laced with unearned arrogance. I feel sorry for the soy boy beta cuck who got tricked into a relationship with you. Just gross. Don’t worry, you’ll be traveling alone again soon enough.
Soy boy? Lol, welcome to VFTW Middle School.
I was told by some that FT Mods wanted beaubo’s approach on FT to get people to do the SAS promo run for him to be shut down, and so they thought it made more sense he approach you as his former business partner.
Hopefully SAS won’t get annoyed and shut down accounts doing the promo run or shut down accounts because they think it’s pushing the limits. SAS has gotten more attention with this promo than they had probably budgeted for uptake.
SFO/EWR there are remote and seasonal workers who have time to travel at this time and may have more time than money or just be in for a different experience than the usual. Maybe some of them are single parents who have alternating weeks with a child and thus have the rest of the time off. Maybe some are retirees or empty nesters who can work from anywhere but like to be frugal.
Just because someone is different than you, I or someone else considered “more respectable” doesn’t make them “losers”. They may want to win an experience on the relative cheap rather than spending their own money. To each their own, with all due respect.