Success stories: 5 tickets to Rovaniemi (almost) free thanks to miles

Today we want to tell the story of one of our readers whom we will call Luke.

In recent weeks we helped him turn 120k membership rewards into 5 round-trip tickets to Santa's home town of Rovaniemi in Finland.

The first thing to know is that, at the small airport a few kilometers from the Arctic Circle, normally only a few airlines fly, and this year only one, namely Finnair with four daily flights from Helsinki.

So from Italy to reach Rovaniemi, you have to stopover in Helsinki, but the fares during the peak season are obviously prohibitive.

After checking availability on the dates concerned and finding that there were sufficient award seats on board the various routes (i.e., Malpensa Rovaniemi, via Helsinki), we contacted the company's customer care to find out what to do, since Luca's family includes 3 children, one of whom is only 18 months old.

Luca transferred 150k membership rewards to his Finnair+ account. Thanks to a conversion rate of 5:4, he managed to create for himself a small treasure of 120k points in the program of the Finnish airline, which belongs to the One World alliance, i.e., that of British Airways and Qatar.

"Finnair has made a good impression on me," Luca explains, "Of course, there are some sore points, such as the fact that if for some reason I have to cancel the trip I will lose the miles, but they have been super efficient and also generous: my one-and-a-half-year-old son will travel for free.

But how much did Luca spend in the end? Just 188 €! Thanks to the membership rewards he was able to achieve significant savings, the total cost of the tickets, in fact, was between 1,500 and 2,000 € (depending on the date).

"That's the beauty of membership rewards points, you can turn them into whatever you want (or almost)," Luca concludes.

Membership rewards points are a prerogative of American Express customers. To learn all about how they are earned and how they are spent read our special feature.

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