I wrote about this last week for any of you runners that will be running the Athens Marathon but I wanted to look at it in a different light with how things have changed! It used to be that you could earn a ton of miles for flying but that is not the case anymore!
Earn More Miles Running Than Flying!
Link: A True Mileage Run – Earning Miles Running the Athens Marathon
US airlines have made it clear – they want to reward people that use their credit cards and those that pay high prices for tickets. If you travel around the world for cheap, you will not be earning a whole lot of airline miles (at least with US airlines).
But, how about this? You could actually earn more miles running 26.2 miles (a marathon) than you could earn flying across the Atlantic Ocean! For the Athens Marathon next month, Aegean is giving anyone who registers and completes the marathon 4,200 Aegean miles! That is about the distance of flying between Frankfurt and Chicago – but many economy tickets will not give you close to that many airline miles for flying it!
Of course, there are plenty of other great reasons to run a marathon as well!
That route above on most economy tickets will not get you to 4,200 miles when crediting to United!
Check out this chart for United for flights on Lufthansa and what you would earn for different economy class fares.
Or, you could run 26.2 miles around Athens and pick up 4,200 miles afterwards! By the way, that is almost enough for a one-way anywhere in Greece with Aegean or it is 10% of the amount needed to fly business class between the US and Europe.
It is kind of crazy that we can more miles doing almost anything now – except for actually flying on economy tickets. Hey, I am glad that Aegean continues to run this great promo and just with US airlines would do something similar (though it would probably be tied to the price paid to enter the marathon!).
