Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 14th of August and I'm delighted to be as a guest today. Mark Potter, he is the managing director of Etty Had Guest. And that is the airline's loyalty scheme for the carrier based in lovely Abu Dhabi. Thank you for joining me, Mark.

First of all, tell me a bit more about Etihad Guest. Is it, dare I say, a standard airline loyalty

scheme? Etiad Guest, it's a frequent flyer program of Etiad Airways, but we certainly feel like

we're a unique program

in relation to some of the benefits that we've articulated and developed in the last couple of

years, and also some of the activities that are in market. So, yes, we provide the general

earn and burn scenarios that you find from most programs, but we think we're unique in our own

special way. Well, what's certainly unique is the extraordinary challenge.

What is that?

How's it shaping up?

Last year in November, the airline, our airline, announced 10 new destinations all in one day.

That's unprecedented for us.

Manetti had perspective.

And we've continued to add destinations to that list over the last 12 months,

the last nine months. The program obviously wanted to get involved in the excitement and the

announcement and we announced the extraordinary challenge, which ultimately means we wanted

to get our members to travel to 15 new destinations that we announced across multiple continents

across the world. And if you did the 15 destinations, then you had the

option to win up to 5 million miles if you come first, 3 million if you come second or 1 million

if you come third. It's a really lovely opportunity for members to experience our destinations

across the world and ultimately have some fun as a consequence of that. I think from my calculation, we're looking at top prize being worth probably $250,000

in value of Etihad flights.

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