✈️ Award Drop: Fly to Spain in style

Estimated read time: 3 minutes and 52 seconds

Good morning and welcome to another Friday edition of Daily Drop!

I’ve got some good stuff to drop today, so let’s dive in:

• ✈️ Award Drop: Fly to Spain in style

• 🌎 Update on the Million Mile Challenge

• 💳 Current Transfer Bonuses

✈️ Award Drop: Fly to Spain in style

What better way to finish off the week than with some deals to fly to Europe in business class?

This time around, the star of the show is American Airlines, which currently has availability between various U.S. cities and Madrid in their comfy business class.

If you want to see for yourself, you can just fire up the ‘ol Daily Drop Pro and run a search from cities like New York, Chicago, Philly, or Charlotte.

And despite the airline itself being American Airlines, using AA miles is not the best way to book.

For that, you’ll want to go to Alaska.

As you can see, Alaska charges fewer miles than AA itself, and is possible to transfer points to.

Don’t forget that, at least for now, there’s a sneaky way to transfer MR Points to Alaska.

Ever since the merger between Alaska and Hawaiian, we’ve been able to transfer MR Points to Hawaiian, then onward to Alaska.

If you have a stash of Bilt points, that is probably a little easier since Bilt transfers directly to Alaska as a 1:1 ratio.

The biggest downside here is that since Alaska doesn’t allow you to book multiple airlines on a single ticket (yet), you can only go as far as Madrid, whereas with AA miles, you could connect to cities like London:

Still, getting across the pond in style and booking a cheap connection flight from there is a totally valid option.

Madrid is connected to basically every major city in Europe, sometimes with budget airlines.

Anyway, availability for these AA flights to Madrid seems to be most ubiquitous in February, though you can find sporadic flights in January and March as well.

FYI - you might see a bunch of availability on British Airways as well, but I’d advise against it since the taxes and fees hover around $1,000. 😬

If you don’t have Daily Drop Pro yet and want to search for flights with ease, don’t forget that you still have a few days to lock in a discounted rate of $99 per year for life!

🌎 Update on the Million Mile Challenge

Okay… I’m super excited about this one…

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about the now-famous Million Mile Challenge being offered by SAS.

Essentially, they’ll give out a million miles to anyone who can fly 15 (out of 16) eligible SkyTeam airlines dotted around the globe.

I think this challenge was meant to be sort of impossible… but in that email, I asked if y’all thought I should give it a try.

Obviously, the response turned out exactly as I suspected it would, and now I have to do it…

To my delight and surprise, a couple of other Daily Drop team members are ALSO taking on the challenge.

Even the planning phases of this project have taught me a lot, and I plan on sharing new travel tips and strategies with you.

But I also thought it would be fun to keep y’all posted on our status as a Daily Drop team.

So as Ali (flight deal guru and points and miles savant), McKay (DD writer and jack of all trades), and myself (weird homeless guy who’s always jet lagged) progress through this challenge knocking off airlines, I’m going to update you with cute little graphics like this to show you how much we’ve accomplished and how close the Daily Drop team is to completing the challenge:

As you can see, I’m really lagging behind… 😬

But don’t worry, I’m jetting off on the first round of flights on Tuesday. And one way I’ve stayed organized is to keep all of these flights in my SAS app.

You see, one of the requirements for this challenge is that all flights need to be credited to SAS.

That means that when booking, checking in, and flying, my SAS number needs to be attached to the booking.

One fun fact is that oftentimes, when you do this, you can actually see your flights in the app of the loyalty program you use. 👇

Let me clarify a bit more…

Let’s say you like to collect Delta miles. Naturally, when you fly an airline like KLM, you want to add your Delta SkyMiles number to the booking so you get Delta points.

If you do, you can actually add that booking to your Delta app, even if you don’t book it through Delta and aren’t flying Delta.

For the sake of this challenge, having flights in my app also confirms, without a doubt, that I have correctly attached my SAS number - which is important here.

Next time I update you, I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned about Fare Basis Codes - and why learning how to find them is useful.

It’s been a chaotic week, folks… but I hope you enjoyed our exciting unveiling of Daily Drop Pro along with the other travel tips from the week.

Take care, have a good weekend, and make sure you Americans go register to vote before Tuesday!!!

See you next time ❤️

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