Friends,

Today’s travel news has largely been headlined by Turkish Airlines out-shining JetBlue’s recent bonus points promotion with one of their own: fly to six Continents on Turkish between June 27th and October 27th of this year and earn one million bonus miles.

At a very conservative $0.01 cent per mile valuation, that is like a $10,000 USD cash prize. By all accounts, this promotion is deal.

The rules are pretty simple:

1. Completion requires landing in six continents on paid Turkish Airlines flights — award tickets and codeshare/partner flights do not count.

2. Only your destination “counts” as a continent — not your point or origination or transit point.

3. You must originate from or transfer via Istanbul; flying their fifth freedom regional services independently do not count or qualify.

4. Flights with final arrival points in Türkiye or the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus also do not count toward the promotion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve used more of my free time than I’d care to admit today studying whether I could pull it off. Basically if you bought cash tickets in economy or business on Turkish Airlines and flew an itinerary like this:

• Dallas to Istanbul to Amman (✅ Asia)

• Amman to Istanbul to Singapore to Melbourne (✅ Oceania)

• Melbourne to Singapore to Istanbul to Athens (✅ Europe)

• Athens to Istanbul to Bogota (✅ South America)

• Bogota to Istanbul to Cairo (✅ Africa)

• Cairo to Istanbul to Dallas (✅ North America)

You would land back in Dallas having qualified for the one million bonus miles. You would also probably have Turkish’s safety video memorized.

To my fast research, one could theoretically fly the entire trip in 7 days or so and spend somewhere between $3500-$4500 for economy tickets — which can be helped in part by obtaining a status match to Miles & Smiles Elite before departure.

But is a week of your time and the invariable exhaustion worth it for a million Turkish Airlines miles? It is hard to say.

Their miles are materially valuable — notably because the current cap on “Classic” level awards alongside their lower priced “Award” level tickets makes redemptions a solid value at both levels. And their business class product is excellent.

One million Turkish miles can land you somewhere between seven and twelve one-way transatlantic business class tickets or one hundred domestic business class flights (if flying between Istanbul and Izmir is your thing). On paper, both examples represent a lot more than our “par” value of $10,000 USD.

You can also redeem their points competitively on Star Alliance partners, though I cannot speak from firsthand experience there. And I am not even exploring the potential value play of redeeming these points for economy travel — nor the incremental opportunity of hitting a few extra continents if you already have paid travel planned on TK.

So is this interesting? Absolutely. And from a marketing perspective I love what Turkish Airlines is doing here.

Fly well.

Links

The Park Hyatt Johannesburg looks to finally be opening on July 1st.

Fascinating BBC article on North Korea’s tourism industry aspirations.

Hertz is (plainly) a disaster.

Qantas is removing seatback screens in their next generation interiors.