A Million Reasons to Travel

Scandinavian Airlines once offered a million reasons to travel — literally. By October 2024, they'd launched a challenge: fly with fifteen different SkyTeam airlines before the year was out, and they'd credit your account with one million EuroBonus points. By mid-December, with the deadline closing in, most people I mentioned it to told me it was too late — there simply wasn't enough time left to cover that kind of ground. I'd also been waiting for a stretch that wouldn't collide with work, and the last weeks of December finally gave me that. Between the two, it felt less like a decision and more like a challenge being issued.

What followed was eleven days, nineteen flights, and roughly 55,000 kilometres — more than the circumference of the Earth — routed through Stockholm, London, Washington, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Xiamen, Jakarta, Bali, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Paris, Bucharest, and Madrid, before finally landing back home.

There was real anxiety along the way — a fifteen-hour economy flight from LA to Xiamen, transit windows in China that looked impossible on paper, and a Kenya Airways leg I'd built three separate backup plans around. None of it went wrong. A transfer agent in Guangzhou sorted an entire rebooking in under five minutes, cabin crew across a dozen airlines went out of their way for a stranger travelling alone, and a border guard in Vietnam, baffled by my itinerary, simply shrugged and let me through once I explained what I was doing.

Sleeping in an actual bed was rare — most nights were spent on planes, in airport lounges, or dozing near a departure gate. When a proper hotel room did appear, it felt like a genuine luxury.

It wasn't all airports, either. When the layovers were long enough, I went out and looked around — a walk along the beach in Los Angeles, a Christmas Eve display in Bali, an evening over Taipei's night markets, a small restaurant in Bucharest found through a travel blog, a walk through Singapore after dark, a view over Ho Chi Minh City before heading back to the terminal. Brief glimpses of places I'd never been, but real ones.

By the time I landed in Amsterdam on day eleven — the fifteenth airline, challenge complete — my legs were tired, and so was the rest of me. But something else had been topped up along the way: a kind of wonder I hadn't expected to find in an itinerary built entirely around airline codes. A few weeks later, an email confirmed it: a million EuroBonus points, credited without a hitch.