How would you like to redeem two million miles for an award ticket? That is 2,000,000 miles for one trip – and it does not even guarantee that you will get the flight! Fortunately, you do not have to pay the miles if you do not get picked for the flight. 🙂 Here is a fun little award redemption for a weekend!
The Two Million Mile Award Ticket
I wrote a few months ago about the one flight I wanted to take but couldn’t use points for. As it turns out, and as a reader pointed out, you can use miles for it but it takes a lot. I am talking about the Virgin Galactic spaceship. This vehicle will take the passengers 360,000 feet up to space and will last 2.5 hours. It will be a cozy trip with only 6 other passengers, how’s that for exclusive?
You can either pay $250,000 for the ticket, or you can use 2,000,000 Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Miles for the shot at being on the spacecraft. If you are selected, the miles will then be debited from your account. As value of miles go, this is a great redemption as it values your Flying Club miles at a rate of 12.5 cents per mile. 🙂
In one more twist to this redemption possibility, the only miles that can be used for this flight must come from flying. So, no buying miles, no transferring miles, and no credit card miles can be used towards this flight. For fun, let’s break down how much flying you would have to do  to earn that many miles.
Earning the miles
If you flew round-trips from Tokyo to Johannesburg (via London) in Upper Class and you were at Gold status (which you would have from this amount of flying), you would earn 71,000 miles. It would require you to fly that trip 28 times! If you did this in economy, it would require you to fly it 42 times! If those economy tickets only costed you $1,400 each (which would be a great deal), it would cost you $60,000 to earn those miles. Not only that, but it would take you a very long time to do all of that flying!
This has to be the most exclusive award redemption in the world – not just because of the cost but also because of how you must earn these miles to actually redeem for it. Instead, you could just pay the $250,000… 🙂
You got your math incorrectly. It is valued at 12.5 cents per mile. It is a fantastic award.
True aspiration!
You are right – my bad! Thanks for fixing my math 🙂
Now how would you book your flight to ABQ or ELP in order to get close to your 2 million mile award trip if you can call it a trip Virgin America doesnt fly to either so you would end up on a Code Share with DL (I think)
so to where does this galactic flight actually fly?
Just up into space and then back down – total distance up is 360,000 feet.
Jeremy makes a good point. Does Virgin America flights count as Virgin Atlantic flights?
No, only miles earned on Virgin Atlantic flights count towards that require 2 million number.
If VS had a bigger route network I would actually fly them exclusively for 5-7 years just for the chance to be on the Virgin Galactic.
Another 2 million miles redemption would be the Etihad Residence; but that’s harder, in my opinion, given Etihad miles expire after 3 years regardless of activity, whereas VS never expires if there is activity within a certain time frame.