By Julia Buckley, CNN
(CNN) — Who knew becoming a millionaire was so easy?
When European airline SAS, or Scandinavian Airlines, switched airline “alliance” in late 2024, it decided to make a song and dance about it, creating frequent flyer “millionaires” in the process.
For 27 years, the airline had been part of the Star Alliance, an umbrella collection of 25 global carriers including stalwarts of the sky like United, Singapore Airlines and Ethiopian.
But last year SAS — based in Copenhagen, with Stockholm and Oslo its other major hubs — switched to SkyTeam, which counts Delta, Virgin Atlantic and Air France-KLM among its members.
Airline alliances have long been beloved of frequent flyers, who can take “codeshare” flights on any airline in the group, while still earning points and miles on their preferred airline’s program.
So for an airline to switch alliance can be a seismic shift for travelers with engrained flying patterns.
“[We’d had] 27 years of telling customers, ‘Go with this airline because they’re the best’ — so our customers were really used to using, say, United on a US domestic trip,” says Aron Backström, VP of product and loyalty at SAS.
“Those habits are really engrained. And now we have a new set of partners — really high quality, but not as known to Scandinavian customers and not part of our members’ habits. So we felt the need to shake that up, and do something big to create some excitement and willingness to try them out.”
The team came up with a challenge: members of their EuroBonus frequent flyer program who flew with 15 different SkyTeam airlines between October 8 and December 31 would receive one million EuroBonus points — worth around $10,000 in potential flights.
Almost 50,000 of the eight million members of the EuroBonus program signed up for the challenge. Around 7,000 of them were new members who’d joined the program specifically to complete the challenge.
Around 900 made it to the end and became millionaires. One of them was a member from Norway who’d joined EuroBonus when the program launched, 33 years ago. Another was a mother-daughter couple looking to spend quality time together.
Here, two of them share their experience — and explain why it wasn’t for the fainthearted.
‘I dreamed of traveling the world’
Of the frequent flyers taking part in the challenge, around 30% were women — a heavy gender disparity if you judge it by real-world standards, but pretty promising for frequent flyer circles, which tend to be male-dominated.
Nara Lee, a 36-year-old travel YouTuber from Chuncheon, South Korea, was one of them. It was her first toehold in the world of frequent flying.
“I wasn’t really aware of airline alliances,” she says. “This experience introduced me to how they work.”
She knew nothing about SAS, but as soon as she heard about the challenge — halfway though the qualifying period, in mid-November — she wanted to do it.
“I was a nail artist for 15 years, but ever since I was young, my dream had always been to travel the world,” she says.
“Last year, I finally started traveling abroad. However, since I don’t speak English well, I ended up only joining package tours.
“One day, I came across a video about the SAS challenge on YouTube, and my heart started racing. Even though I had no experience booking international flights on my own and couldn’t speak English, I was filled with the desire to take on this challenge no matter what. I wanted to earn one million miles and finally make my childhood dream of traveling the world a reality.”
Lee spent over 160 hours in the air, flying economy, to bag her miles. Her route took her through Asia, across to the Americas, over the Atlantic to Europe, and onwards to southeast Asia before returning to Seoul.
Since bagging her million miles, she’s already put them to good use. In March, she spent 127,500 flying to Paris and back with Air France — and this time she did so in business class. In April, she jetted off to Ho Chi Minh City for 70,000 miles, flying economy on the way out, and business back. All pretty much for free — paying around $155 and $95 in taxes respectively.
Acting out ‘a midlife crisis’
Another unlikely flyer taking to the skies was Barry Collins. The 44-year-old from Eastbourne, in the UK, has been an “avid” collector of airline points for the past decade, accruing them through regular shopping and using them to pay for ‘free’ flights.
When Collins read about the challenge on frequent flyer website Head for Points, it was “the right thing at the right time.” He’d recently wound up his business, and though he has fingers in other pies, “I was at a loose end, shuffling round the house.” It was, he says, a “midlife crisis.”
His wife, Cheryl, was encouraging him to go on a solo trip. She would send him missives advising him, “You need to just piss off and climb up the Andes or something,” he says. But although Collins had traveled to backpacker destinations when younger, he didn’t want to go on a group trip.
With Cheryl’s blessing, when he read about the challenge, he realized it was something that would give him a sense of achievement — and something he could do alone. “It scratched an itch,” he says now.
Collins’ cardinal rule was that he would only fly economy — his aim was to get a return on his investment, and he felt flying business would be less of a challenge. “Lying flat and sipping champagne is different to roughing it in the cheap seats,” he says ruefully.
Another non-negotiable: He would only take hand luggage. Checking a bag across multiple connections “would possibly have led to a disaster,” he says.
Third rule: Instead of flying straight in and out, he would stop over in destinations that were new to him.
“I’ve been to America 100 times, and to Mexico but never Seoul or Vietnam,” he says. “That interested me more than going back somewhere I’d been before. I had school runs to do.”
Which leads us to his final rule: That this challenge must not derail real life. Instead of doing one round-the-world trip, Collins went back and forth from the UK, taking regional trips in tranches.
For his trip to the US and Mexico via France — all destinations he already knew — he departed on the Friday morning and was back on Sunday night and on hand to take the kids to school on Monday.
He started with a family vacation in Madrid. Then he tackled European airlines, flying to Paris, Bucharest (where he stayed overnight), and back via Amsterdam and Stockholm.
Next up was that weekend race around Atlanta, Mexico City and Paris again.
And his fourth and final trip was an odyssey through the Middle East and Asia: Jeddah, Jakarta, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Taipei, Xiamen, Shanghai, Seoul, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Shanghai again, and back to London Gatwick.
In total he took 22 flights on 19 airlines, 16 of which were SkyTeam. Little wonder he says the challenge was keeping going physically.
How to survive hours on a plane
So what did their odysseys teach our two intrepid travelers?
Firstly, how to sleep on an airplane. Collins’ accessory of choice was a specially shaped TRTL travel pillow. He paired that with an eyemask, and recommends either headphones or earplugs.
If you want to sleep, he suggests stopping drinking an hour before the flight, then going to the bathroom one final time as you board.
“The best tip for sleeping on a plane is simply being exhausted,” jokes Lee. “If economy feels too uncomfortable to sleep in, that probably means you’re not tired enough yet. I was so tired that I could sleep anywhere without any special tricks.”
The pair — who never crossed paths — also appreciated the culture shocks the trips gave them.
For Collins, Jeddah airport confounded his expectations of Saudi Arabia. “They all spoke perfect English, there were signs in both Arabic and English, and the airport and lounge were great,” he says — although he didn’t travel onwards in the country, but connected straight out.
He also loved Seoul and Bucharest, and is already planning a return for a city break in the latter. “It had Communist-era concrete blocks, but then you’d stumble into the Old Town with cobbled streets, cafes and bars,” he says.
As for airports, he loved the calm of Stockholm and Amsterdam, but found the waiting times at Bucharest and Ho Chi Minh City trying. A special mention goes to the US Department of Homeland Security, which quizzed him heavily. “Americans have a knack — they use the word ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ and make you feel uncomfortable,” he says. It was the polar opposite of immigration staff in Jakarta who waved him through when he hadn’t realized he needed to buy a tourist visa.
“One of the benefits of traveling as a white middle-aged, middle class man is they don’t bother with you,” he says. The same goes for finding accommodation — a crucial way he kept his costs down.
“In Ho Chi Minh City a taxi driver dropped me off on the main road and pointed to an alleyway. I had to go down it and turn left onto an even smaller alleyway. The privilege of being a middle-aged white guy is that I can say yeah, I’m fine with that, which maybe a woman wouldn’t feel comfortable doing. I felt really comfortable wandering around Taipei on my own in the middle of the night. I’m not sure a solo female traveler would have the same experience.”
Indeed, Lee had to plan her trip more precisely. She often slept at airports, but “always stayed in crowded areas or used 24-hour cafes and restaurants.”
She didn’t go out late at night but was “constantly on alert.”
Her scariest moment was in New York. “In Korea, you rarely see people under the influence of drugs, but in New York, it was quite common. Nobody threatened me but just seeing people in that state was intimidating,” she says.
Finally, they both learned to change their plans on the hoof when things went wrong. Due to some confusion with the promotion, some flights (like Collins’ Delta flight to Atlanta) weren’t counted as part of the offer. He had to reroute from Seoul to Guangzhou to add in another carrier — Kenya Airways, which flies Guangzhou-Bangkok.
Lee, meanwhile, was caught up in a severe storm leaving Seoul for her first flight. She ended up stuck on her China Eastern plane for 10 hours, missing her next two connecting flights, on China Airlines and XiamenAir. While she was told she’d be rebooked and hosted in a hotel, it didn’t happen. Instead, she had to get herself to Guangzhou to pick up her Kenya Airways flight to Bangkok.
$10,000-worth of points for $4,560
When the pair added up their final costs, they’ve both “earned” thousands of dollars in airline points which they can now convert into flights.
Collins spent £4,784.54 ($6,185.13) in total, the bulk of which (£3,947.88 or $5,103.55) was on flights. By staying in basic, independently run hotels, he spent less on accommodation (£234.47) than he did on parking at London’s Heathrow airport (£256.70).
Lee spent 5,000,000 Korean won (around $3,800) on flights and around 1,000,000 won ($760) on food and accommodation.
Their flights, one after the other, elicited some quick favorites and least favorites, too. Collins rates China Eastern as best value: “What you got for what you paid was phenonemonal.” XiamenAir, conversely, was his worst-value flight, and his least favorite was Kenya Airways: “It wasn’t bad, just not great. It was a bit tatty round the edges, I had to hold my headphones in the headphone port.”
Lee loved Korean Air for the lack of language barrier and Garuda Indonesia: “The crew members were incredibly warm and welcoming, and that alone made my entire flight experience feel special.” Her least favorite? KLM, for a noisy Bucharest-bound flight. “The crew did nothing to manage the noise level. Also, I still remember the in-flight meal — a sandwich — which was quite underwhelming,” she says.
‘Do the daft thing’
So was it all worth it?
For SAS, certainly. Backström says that the cost of creating 900 “millionaires,” essentially gifting each one $10,000 in flights (to be confirmed in a couple of years once the miles have been used), has already paid back in brand awareness. Lee, for example, has gone from not knowing SAS to being a fully paid-up fan, just in time for them to launch their Copenhagen-Seoul route in September. Traffic on the airline’s SkyTeam subsite saw a “huge increase,” Backström says, and it’s seen a boost in interest from the US, China, and South Korea in particular.
Of course, it has received pushback for encouraging flying at a time of climate crisis, but Backström says that the people who took the challenge were “already planning to travel a lot.”
“We’re an airline, we can’t be ashamed of marketing our product,” he says.
Lee, who’d never been previously interested in frequent flyer programs, is now a SkyTeam aficionado. “Now every SkyTeam airline feels like a familiar neighbor,” she says. “Whenever I board a flight, I can almost picture my past self, curled up in a corner seat, exhausted from my SAS run. After everything we’ve been through together, I feel like I won’t be flying with other airlines as much anymore.”
As soon as her points were deposited, she booked that trip to Paris. She had connected through Charles de Gaulle airport on her millionaire mission.
“Even though I only saw the airport, I remember being totally captivated — it felt like I was inside a concert hall,” she says. “But back then, I was exhausted and definitely not looking my best. That moment made me promise myself, ‘Next time, I’ll come back wearing something nice and flying business class.’ So it was a dream come true. Sitting in business class felt surreal.”
For Collins, who has yet to redeem any miles was a route out of a period of feeling low.
“I feel like it’s made a massive difference,” says his wife, Cheryl. “Before he went, he was a bit sad. He’s always been emotionally steady and this was the first time in 12 years seeing him sad. Now he’s up for it all again. That confidence is back, that swagger.”
It’s also, of course, a tale he’ll tell for the rest of his days.
“The best stuff happens when you’re doing something a bit bonkers,” he says. “You look back on thing with rose-tinted glasses. You don’t think about how your body was shaking at being awake for 30 hours, and if you fall asleep and miss one flight the house of cards would all fall down.
“You don’t think about how you were going to be sick and were hallucinating because you were so tired. You think about the chicken shop in Seoul at midnight.
“Do the daft thing to get the anecdote.”
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