Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 20th of February and I have a special two-part podcast for you with Barry Collins. He is a property developer from Eastbourne in Sussex. But for the latter part of 2024, he was actually travelling the world on the SAS million point

challenge. The idea here is that SAS, the Scandinavian airline, switched to the Sky Team Alliance.

And to celebrate that fact, they said, right, anybody who can

before the end of the year fly on 15 different Sky Team airlines will get one million frequent

flyer points. I caught up with Barry, and this is what he told me. Yeah, they literally go all the way

east and all the way west and everywhere in between and you've got to do 15 of the 17 airlines.

The first trip that I did around Europe, we did a little family holiday. So we flew out with

easy jet to Barcelona, the train from Barcelona to Madrid. So we had a little family holiday in Spain

a few days. And then we got a Air Europa flight back from Madrid to London. So that was the

first airline to be ticked off on my first back-to-back sort of trek, I guess. It was London to

Paris and then Paris to Bucharest. And I stayed overnight in Bucharest. I tried to

stay overnight in a few places just to give me a little sampling places I've never been to

before and never been to Romania or to Bucharest. So I made sure that that was one of my

overnights. I spent a night in the old town, dinner and a beer and an ice cream, had a wander

around the cobbled streets and then back to the hotel because I had a very early start again the following morning on Sunday and it was Bucharest to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Stockholm and Stockholm back to London. So I was back home by, in time it's put the kids to bed on Sunday evening. So it's not too obtrusive. It didn't get in the way of real life too much. So let me get this right. And the same day, you went to Paris in France, Bucharest in Romania,

Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Stockholm in Sweden. So four capitals I calculate in one weekend.

And one weekend, yeah. And I presume that while you got a night in book arrest, the rest it was mostly just,

I'm here I am at the airport.

Here I am at the airport.

So yeah, so yeah, a couple of weeks later, it was then London to Atlanta, Atlanta to Mexico

City, Mexico City to Paris, and Paris back to London.

Started on the Friday morning and I was back Saturday evening, so I was probably only gone for

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