Originally Posted by
nacho
Exactly - the easiest is to buy 6 round trip ticket ex-whereever you are connecting through IST. But does it make sense to fish 1M miles that equals to less than 5 C return awards? Remember their YQ is insane so the only sensible way to do that is to do upgrade awards - however, they are hard to find with all the CC holders can also redeem those seats.
I agree that the challenge doesn't make sense if you're starting from the scratch
and you only do it with the aim of gaining some monetary value.
But imagine you have trips to e.g. Sydney and Canada planned anyway, that will give you 3 out of 6 continents, so now the only extra trips you have to take are Asia, South America and Africa. Then the cost gets much lower (Asia and Africa can be done cheaply ex-IST during a stopover, and you only have South America left where some nice fares are available). And of course, fulfilling the challenge will take you to interesting places - this is a crucial element as far as I'm concerned, the challenge only makes sense if you also get value out of flights you take to fulfil it.
Still, I think TK went a bit too far with the restrictions, sometimes unreasonably so. I take it that these challenges exist primarily to generate talk-about the brand and the last thing you want is articles about how you cheated people. Confusing T&Cs + TK's tragic customer service + TK's tragic IT sounds like a great recipe for a bomb.