February 21st - The SAS million-point challenge – Part 2
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today the second episode of a special two-part podcast with Barry Collins – a property developer from Eastbourne who decided to take up the SAS million-point challenge. He had to fly on 15 of the 17 SkyTeam airlines in the last few months of 2024 to learn 1,000,000 frequent flyer points. We last heard from him when, at Jakarta, a fellow frequent-flyer broke it to him that some of his flights didn't actually count ...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 21st of February, |
| 0:05.2 | and if you were kind enough to listen yesterday, you will know that I am talking to Barry Collins, |
| 0:10.5 | property developer from Eastbourne. For the latter part of 2024, he was actually travelling the world |
| 0:18.9 | on the SAS Million Point challenge. Anybody who can, before the end of the |
| 0:26.4 | year, fly on 15 different Sky Team airlines will get 1 million frequent flyer points. But a very |
| 0:36.1 | large spanner appeared in the works when he happened to bump into somebody |
| 0:40.3 | else who was doing the same thing who said, well, you do realize some of your flights don't count. |
| 0:45.1 | This is what happened next. So when I was at the airport in Taipei, about to check in for my |
| 0:52.3 | flight, I had to ask the people there if I could pay |
| 0:55.9 | extra to change my fare code, which they promptly declined. So I then had to buy the same |
| 1:01.6 | exact flights that I'd already booked with a different fair class code in order to get a different |
| 1:06.6 | letter on my boarding pass in order for my flights to count with Jamen Airlines for double the |
| 1:12.7 | price I'd already paid. So I think I paid about £130 for the flights originally and then |
| 1:17.5 | I paid another 270 for the flights. So I ended up spending 400 and something with some pretty |
| 1:24.5 | pretty short flight. There were particularly long flights here that were taken. That meant then that my Jamin Airlines flights counted. |
| 1:30.7 | So now I only had to find one flight, which was my Delta flight was never going to count. |
| 1:36.0 | I can't go back to America. |
| 1:37.1 | So I had to find a way of getting one more flight in order to make my 15. |
| 1:41.8 | I should have had one flight left to go from Seoul on China, |
| 1:45.2 | Eastern Airlines to get me home. Yeah. And that would have been my 15. However, if I'd have |
| 1:50.4 | taken that flight home from Seoul, I would have been forever stuck on 14 because of my after flight. |
| 1:55.8 | So what could you do? What did you do? I didn't get on my flight home from Seoul. You just throw it away. |
... |
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