You’ve surely seen our detailed guides on the 2 amazing challenges that were announced just days apart by airlines. These are incredible opportunities that give you a ton of points (1 million with Turkish Airlines and/or 350,000 with JetBlue).
It’s absolutely phenomenal, and I’m going to have a lot more content soon (including turnkey itineraries).
But I already wanted to give you a quick update on my thoughts since the announcements, and also share my own intentions at the end if you’re interested.
I think it can be useful to help you make a decision if you’re interested in taking advantage of them (in addition to the “is it worth it?” sections already included in the guides).
Here are a few new thoughts on the 2 crazy promotions.
Reminder of the basics of the 2 promotions
If you’re a normal person, you’ll probably have to choose between the 2 promotions.
The Turkish Airlines one is really more lucrative (value of ≈ $12,000 to UNLIMITED), that’s obvious.
But it also costs more to do. And it’s also much more complex.
The JetBlue one involves taking more flights and is less lucrative (value of ≈ $5,950 to UNLIMITED), indeed.
But as I’ve already added in our free newsletter since the first posts, the flights are shorter, cheaper, and closer! You can also spread them out more easily across multiple separate trips, and you have more time to do them.
As mentioned, I’m going to do a much more detailed comparison of the 2 soon.
New thoughts on the 2 promotions
I was obviously completely obsessed with both promotions for days (I’m not even exaggerating).
I loved my round-the-world trip last fall so much (and the million points that’s going to give me $80,000 by extrapolating my 1st redemption) that I obviously wanted to do both new challenges as soon as I saw them…
I’d rushed to create the guides so you’d have the most information as quickly as possible, and now I’ve had time to think about it in a bit more detail.
Turkish Airlines promotion
The more I think about the Turkish Airlines promo, the more I think it’s only worth it if you had already planned a big trip (far away), if you take advantage of it to really visit as well, or if you do it purely for the once-in-a-lifetime experience of doing the 6 continents in a crazy challenge.
In other words, maybe it’s not worth doing as a pure mileage run (without visiting anything). Because just for the bonus alone, it’s rough, honestly (even though the bonus is a huge million).
If you had already planned a big trip, basically, it’s just 2 long roundtrips more (and you probably already had at least a few weeks to leave). It’s really worth it a lot more. The other 3, I don’t bother too much with; doing Africa, Europe, and Asia from İstanbul is really not a big deal.
If you take advantage of the promo to visit during the journey, it’s really more pleasant. For example, if you’ve always wanted to visit Australia, it’s an excellent opportunity to do so. Turkish is the airline that serves the most countries in the world, so you can clearly go where you want, and that’s cool!
If you do it for the thrill of an absolutely unique trip that fewer than 1000 people in the world will do (at least if it’s like the SAS promotion last fall, with just 940 who succeeded, including only 18 Canadians), I totally understand you. It’s clearly worth it for this!
Let’s look at the 2 aspects, which are time and money.
Time
It’s really an ENORMOUS amount of time in the air.
I estimate that it will be almost 50,000 miles of distance traveled to complete this.
That might not tell you much, so to put it in perspective, it’s almost 15 times the distance between Montreal and Paris. That’s not nothing!
To give you another comparison that might be more striking for me because I had to endure it, my round-the-world trip last fall was 30,487 miles. So the Turkish promo requires more than 50% more!
It’s the fact that you need to always return to İstanbul that’s brutal; it makes each of these itinerary lines actually 2 flights each time.
I think you need to have at least 3 weeks, if you don’t want to just die of fatigue before reaching 6 continents…
Several Americans are surely going to do it in 2 weeks or even less (but they’ll often travel in business class for half of the 6 long flights).
Because this journey is also an extremely long one to do in economy class specifically.
As mentioned, you can theoretically do 6 of the 12 flights on other airlines. Half are short flights, so let’s exclude those, which shouldn’t be a problem in economy class.
By redeeming your existing points to travel in luxurious lie-flat pod seats in business class for at least the 3 very long flights that don’t need to be on Turkish Airlines, your experience would clearly be more pleasant.
But the problem is that roundtrip flights are cheaper than 2 separate one-ways, because these are long-distance flights and they’re paid with cash or with rewards of the more simple type (which is NOT true for short-distance flights nor for all flights paid with rewards of the more valuable type).
So the 3 long flights on Turkish would cost more. But hey, you’d still save money overall because you’d pay for the other 3 with points. And you’d be incredibly more comfortable.
Money
Well, for a change from my negativity, there’s good news.
I’m pretty confident I’m going to be able to create an itinerary for you for less than what I had quickly estimated, which was $5000 net in flights ($6000 in flights minus $1000 in extra welcome bonuses unlocked).
Maybe closer to $5000 in flights, so $4000 net.
By the way, if you don’t get as many cards as me (almost a certainty; I applied for 9 new ones on the same day in April; a new record 😅), you’re therefore eligible for more offers right now and you can easily make more than $1000 in welcome bonuses with your spending for these flights.
This is vital, as always. It’s 20% of your flight budget that you get in welcome bonuses!!! And it’s urgent, so that you receive the card or cards before booking your flights (if you get more than 1, apply for them the same day; it’s important).
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My thoughts about the other aspect of money, the value of the million points, haven’t really changed.
But the more research I’ve done on the Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles program, the more it confirms what I told you is true: it’s really more niche and harder to maximize! There are much fewer good redemptions than with other programs. Beware if you’re not flexible.
It’s really not like the transatlantic flights in business class for 50,000 points with my million SAS points, a redemption that’s very mainstream and allows you to use up all the points very easily.
Turkish points aren’t great for Europe (except for Türkiye), so I wanted to repeat it since for many people the planet equals only the Caribbean and Europe, sadly.
If you’re like me and love going further, they remain excellent points. If you’re flexible, of course (the key for business class and airline points, always).
JetBlue promotion
The more I think about the JetBlue promo, the more I think this one is also only interesting for those who are tempted by a fun adventure but can’t/won’t do the other… or already wanted to go to Florida a few times. But the other promo clearly generates a lot more excitement in the community of flight and point enthusiasts.
In other words, even if it’s not that hard to do even as a mileage run (without visiting anything), it’s a lot of flights. Much less lucrative than the other one and not much cheaper. But certainly a lot less intense! You also have nearly 6 full months to do it, so that helps.
If you want to give a flight challenge a try, it’s a much easier challenge. As long as you’re flexible enough to redeem the points, that’s obviously the basic prerequisite for all scenarios (important to know if you’re a beginner). Assuming you have the financial flexibility to pre-pay (the cost of the 20 flights) to get a ton of travel later (the huge bonus), like so many people always do for normal overpriced future trips.
If you want to go to Florida a few times, it costs you a bit less to do all this (in time and money) and it’s logistically simpler, but you still need a desire to do a unique adventure, honestly.
Let’s look at the 2 aspects again; time and money.
Time
As I had written, if you want, you can easily do the 20 flights without having the slightest flight longer than just going from the Northeast to Florida (or just one transcontinental to get there first if you’re out West). Nothing stressful at all: they’re all short and tolerable. Especially since you have 2 extra months with this promo!
You can also easily do the challenge in a few separate trips if you don’t want to do everything at once, for those who can’t leave for long.
You don’t even want to take the slightest day off? For many of you in Ontario and Québec, you can do this just on weekends in the worst case, as long as it doesn’t bother you to, each time, go take a plane departing from Detroit (DTW), Buffalo (BUF), Rochester (ROC), Syracuse (SYR), Albany (ALB), Manchester (MHT), Boston (BOS), etc.
Ideally, a different airport each time (by car and on separate trips, changing each time is not that big a deal), so that each airport counts for the total of 20 on your return flight.
If you don’t have a car or don’t want to drive, you can take positioning flights to New York or Fort Lauderdale and leave from there, but that obviously increases the cost a bit. Redo the calculations carefully.
Money
Here, I don’t think I can bring down the cost. The fare class exclusion mentioned is the obstacle.
To be continued here too. I must admit I haven’t put much time into that one.
This was the most wonderful promotion in the world to me on Wednesday… until Turkish Airlines came out with theirs on Friday!!!
I’m just kidding…
My own thoughts on the 2 promotions
To absolutely no one’s surprise, I decided to go for it!
Not just for one of the promotions, but both!!! YOLO!
You can never have too many wonderful airline points that are worth so much!!! Especially when you want to travel in business class more often, like I do.
Even though I already have almost 2 million with the huge offers from recent years, bill payment services, the SAS millionaire challenge, etc.
I always want more!
Having too many points is literally NEVER a problem. Not having enough, on the other hand… we see people with that problem every day, unfortunately, despite it being sooooo easy to get plenty.
Especially since my girlfriend really liked her first 2 flights in luxurious lie-flat pod seats for our Europe trip in May/June. It’s now going to cost me more points… she never wants to go back to the back for long flights.
And these challenges are such exciting adventures. I love the concept, I love the uniqueness of the journeys, I love absolutely everything about these promotions.
Many of you liked following my round-the-world trip last fall here, but especially in real-time in stories on my personal Instagram account, so that was another good argument. If I don’t get sick this time, I’ll be able to make even more real-time content.
My first decision was to do the Turkish promotion. I’ve never been to Oceania (my only missing continent, excluding Antarctica), so it just makes sense to take advantage of it. Why not do 200% more continents while at it? 😅
Then, in my situation, with plenty of flights to the United States to buy already, it didn’t really make sense not to do the JetBlue promotion (especially with 2 more months to complete it).
Knowing how to count well is vital in the world of travel rewards. So, doing Turkish didn’t change the mathematics of JetBlue at all. Doing Turkish only changed the time and schedule aspect, obviously. But I’m able to do JetBlue in just 3-4 extra days, and I can work from anywhere.
Honestly, I think both promotions are going to be done really easily in my case.
I have absolutely nothing booked or confirmed yet, but I have a good general plan in mind. I’ll start booking this weekend because I don’t need to wait for my new cards; I still have minimum spends left from April (I’ll just move up my next applications since I’ll finish these up faster than expected).
(It’s really so simple to maximize the travel rewards you earn: all your spending should serve to unlock welcome bonuses. That’s it!)
Let’s look at the 2 aspects here too in my situation; time and money.
Time
I already had a minimum of 8 trips planned this fall: 1 big trip (hadn’t yet decided where in Asia) and 7 very short trips (1 to 4 days) for specific events in Canada and the United States, including at least 2 that I planned to extend to travel to Mexico for a week (after Vegas and before Chicago) and to Central America for a week (after Miami).
Fortunately, I hadn’t booked anything yet.
Another example of how procrastination is a winning life strategy (I’m kidding friends; unless you’re extremely flexible and quite rich in points like I’ve been for many years, it’s generally better not to wait until the last minute too much to book trips at the best price).
So even by doing both promos, I won’t be gone for much longer overall than I was supposed to.
I was planning to do my big fall trip between 2 of my events (available seats in business class are obviously much more numerous departing from the United States).
But to be able to do both promotions, I’m going to move it up to this summer instead.
(I publicly thank my girlfriend for her great understanding of my severe addiction to travel and to challenges like these especially!)
I absolutely hate traveling in summer with the hordes of tourists, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
I think I’m going to go to Australia in summer… it’s their winter obviously, so it’s going to be a bit less bad. Then probably Africa and South America. Europe will be in October as much as possible, to definitely not go there in summer, particularly with the current huge overtourism problem!
Yes, I think I’m going to split the Turkish trip into 2 to enjoy it more this time (in the fall, it was very intense). About 4 weeks at the end of July and 2 weeks in early October. It’s not optimal, but I want to.
With the big trip done this summer, I’ll be able to more easily do the rest of the 20 JetBlue flights throughout my events this fall.
Money
Since I’m not really going to be gone longer than I planned, the cost of everything but flights is a net of close to zero more for me. But there are a lot more flights…
Doing the Turkish promo in 1 single trip instead of 2 would save money, because I’d avoid an extra transatlantic roundtrip to go to Türkiye. But I found a tip so that it’s actually just 1 more transatlantic flight, and not 2.
I’m going to choose Colombia as the South American destination for Turkish (and I loved my first trip there). By finishing one of the 2 trips there, I’ll be able to return directly from there pretty cheap, given the historically-low prices between here and South America these days.
For my additional transatlantic flight, I’m going to fly JetBlue (they have a few routes that are decently priced), so that’s going to give me 2 flights for their promo (thanks to a connection)!
That way, it doesn’t really cost that much more to split the Turkish challenge in 2, and I’ll be able to enjoy it a lot more by having more time to visit.
Anyway, I’m ready to pay a bit more for that, rather than do a mileage run. I have so many points that I don’t spend much money on travel. My March trips to Asia and June to Europe cost me almost nothing, as is often the case.
And with another 1.35M points… I know it won’t cost me much in flights for the next few years.
But it’s obviously up to each person, and I’m going to prepare an itinerary example as a mileage run if you want to do it at the lowest cost.
As I said, I was already going to do a big trip. I would have paid in points, and now I’m going to have to pay in cash, but it still cancels out in terms of the equivalent cost (rewards are a very real currency!) for the flights to Australia.
In terms of expensive flights, that leaves the one-way between Türkiye and Colombia and the roundtrip between North America and Türkiye. They’re at least partially canceled out by what I would have paid for Mexico and Central America, as well as for my short flights in my big trip.
The 3 short not-too-expensive roundtrips don’t worry me at all. These aren’t big amounts. I am very good with these expenses to get 1 million points.
For JetBlue, just going to my 4 events in the United States in September, October, and December allows me to do about 10 flights organically (by making a few strategic connections that aren’t too expensive). Very little extra money, just a bit more time.
So that leaves about 8 missing flights. I’ll be able to do them easily, as a mileage run in the worst case, since they’re all short flights! But I’m also tempted to take advantage of it to visit Puerto Rico, Belize, and Honduras… to be continued!
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Summary
I’ve been able to reflect a bit more about the 2 promotions (Turkish Airlines 1 million points challenge and JetBlue 350,000 points challenge) since they were announced. These few thoughts, as well as my own journey in making my decision, should help you choose whether or not you feel like doing this journey (or both if you’re feeling adventurous).
What would you like to know about the Turkish Airlines and JetBlue challenges? Tell us in the comments below.
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Featured image: Princetown, Australia (photo credit: Victor)
