How I Took My Family to Thailand and Singapore for Christmas on EuroBonus Points

That split outbound wasn't aesthetic. It was the only way the trip could be booked at all, and the structure that made it work is what this article is about.

The bookings

Two separate bookings, three travelers, five different airlines collectively.

Booking 1 (me, solo, open-jaw):

• Outbound, December 20: ARN → LHR (SAS) → RUH (Virgin Atlantic) → BKK (Saudia), Business
• Return, mid-January: SIN → AMS (KLM) → ARN, Business

A note on the routing: Virgin Atlantic operated LHR-RUH from March 2025 until early 2026, when the route was discontinued. The specific routing here isn't reproducible today, but the principle is — there's almost always a SkyTeam routing through London, Paris, Amsterdam, or another hub that gets you to the destination if you're willing to find it.

Booking 2 (wife + son, open-jaw):

• Outbound, December 19: ARN → MAN (SAS) → CDG (Air France) → BKK (Air France), Business — with the MAN-CDG-BKK leg booked as a married segment
• Return, mid-January: SIN → AMS (KLM) → ARN, Business

Listed partner Business price (pre-December 2025 devaluation): 187,500 EuroBonus points round-trip per person to Southeast Asia on SkyTeam partner metal.

With one Amex Elite 2-for-1 voucher per booking: the voucher cuts the points price by 50% across all travelers on that reservation.

• My booking with voucher applied: 93,750 points (one traveler at 50% of list)
• Wife and son's booking with voucher applied: 187,500 points (two travelers at 50% of list each = 93,750 × 2)
• Total: 281,250 points for three Business Class round-trip tickets to Southeast Asia over Christmas

For context: the standard list price for the same trip without any vouchers would have been 562,500 points, double what we paid.

Taxes and fees, paid in cash at booking: 2,355 SEK for my single-traveler reservation; 1,923 SEK per person for my wife and son. Total cash component for all three travelers came to roughly 6,200 SEK across three Business Class long-haul tickets over peak season.

When this was booked: approximately seven months before departure, in late spring 2025. That's earlier than most travelers plan their Christmas trips, and it had to be — the partner-airline inventory we needed wasn't going to wait.

Why we needed two bookings and not one

The Amex Elite 2-for-1 voucher allows up to two travelers per booking. There is no way to fit three people on a single voucher reservation. Three travelers on one voucher booking is a hard rule, not a guideline.

The choice was between three options:

1. 1One voucher booking for two of us, one full-price booking for the third. Total: 187,500 (voucher booking, two people) + 187,500 (third person at list) = 375,000 points. Burns one voucher.
2. 2Three separate full-price bookings, no vouchers. Total: 562,500. Saves vouchers but pays 281,250 more in points.
3. 3Two voucher bookings split as 1+2. Total: 281,250. Burns both vouchers but minimizes points spend.

Option 3 is what we chose. The economic case is straightforward: each voucher saves 93,750 points on this particular redemption. At any reasonable point valuation, that's substantial value per voucher — the kind of redemption that vouchers exist for. The vouchers expire annually whether they're used or not. Saving them for "later" without a clear plan is the same as letting them lapse.

The non-economic case is also worth being explicit about: this is a trip the family was always going to take, on dates that were always going to be premium-priced.

There was also a hard operational constraint that forced the split. Saudia releases only one Business Class award seat per flight to EuroBonus on the Riyadh-Bangkok leg, which meant all three of us could not have flown that routing together even if we'd wanted to. The decision to split into two bookings wasn't a creative optimization — it was the only way the trip could exist at all. Once forced into two bookings, deploying both vouchers became the obvious move.

How open-jaw made the trip itself work

The Christmas trip wasn't a round-trip to Bangkok. It was a multi-country trip that started in Bangkok in late December and ended in Singapore in mid-January. Routing the booking as standard round-trip to BKK would have meant flying back to Bangkok at the end of the trip just to fly home — an extra internal flight and a wasted travel day for no reason.

EuroBonus permits open-jaw award bookings on the destination side, as long as both endpoints sit within the same award zone. Bangkok and Singapore are both in the South East Asia zone, so flying into BKK and out of SIN priced identically to a closed BKK-BKK round trip. No penalty, no upcharge, no extra fees beyond the standard partner administration fee.

Both of our bookings used this open-jaw structure: BKK in, SIN out. The trip structure became:

• All three of us arrived in Bangkok in late December
• Time in Thailand over the holiday period
• Onward travel down to Singapore in mid-January (separate, not on EuroBonus)
• All three of us flew home together SIN → AMS → ARN on KLM

For long multi-destination trips, this is the routing structure that matters. The points cost identical to a vanilla round-trip; the trip you take is materially better.

Married segments: the Air France complication

One detail worth understanding for anyone planning a similar partner Business booking, especially involving Air France or KLM.

Married segments are a routing-control mechanism partner airlines use to release Business Class award seats only when booked as part of a specific connection profile. The seat from CDG to BKK might be unavailable as a standalone booking but open as the second leg of a MAN → CDG → BKK itinerary. Air France in particular is known for this — the airline releases inventory through specific routing combinations rather than making each segment independently available.

The practical consequence is that finding partner Business space on Air France often requires testing different connection profiles to surface seats that don't appear in straightforward searches. A direct ARN-CDG-BKK search might return no Business availability, while routing through Manchester first might surface seats — same dates, same destination, different routing, completely different inventory.

For my wife and son's booking, the MAN-CDG-BKK segment was a married fare. Booking it required searching beyond the obvious routing options. This is also why partner award booking with EuroBonus often requires phone bookings — the online tool surfaces the obvious routings but rarely tests the alternatives that married segments unlock.

Looking at a partner Business booking that requires unconventional routing? Get in touch — married segments and multi-airline SkyTeam itineraries are exactly the type of work where a second pair of eyes saves both points and frustration.

Why partner-airline strategy matters most over peak periods

SAS direct flights to Southeast Asia in Business over Christmas and New Year are functionally impossible to find on award space. The metal that does exist gets snapped up the moment the booking window opens, 330 days out, and the dates around Christmas are the first to go. By the time most travelers think about December planning in October or November, SAS award inventory for the holiday window is gone.

Partner airlines maintain different inventory pools. Each SkyTeam carrier — Air France, KLM, Virgin Atlantic, Saudia, Korean Air, Vietnam Airlines — releases Business award space according to its own schedule. The metal SAS doesn't have, partners often do. Partner inventory follows different release patterns than SAS, which means options for peak-period travel can surface even when SAS-direct availability has long been gone.

The strategy for peak-period award travel is therefore inverted from what most members default to: instead of searching SAS first and considering partners as fallback, search partners first and treat SAS as one option among many. For Christmas, summer school holidays, and Easter — the three peak periods that drive the highest cash fares and the worst SAS award availability — partner Business through Amsterdam, Paris, London, or Riyadh is where the realistic redemptions exist.

The Amex Elite voucher is what makes those redemptions affordable. Without it, partner Business at 187,500 points round-trip per person is a steep redemption that few members will pull the trigger on. With the voucher, the same redemption becomes 93,750 points per person — competitive with any other premium-cabin tool in the SkyTeam ecosystem.

What this trip taught me

One: peak-period Business Class is realistic on points if you book it as partner metal. Most travelers write off Christmas and New Year for award travel because SAS-direct availability is essentially zero. Partner inventory exists for these dates if you search the right combinations and accept multi-stop routings. KLM, Air France, and Virgin Atlantic all carried our family of three to Southeast Asia over the holiday window when SAS could not.

Two: vouchers are most valuable when deployed against high-points redemptions, not flexible ones. It's tempting to save Amex Elite vouchers for a "perfect" booking that may never come. The reality is that they expire annually, and a 93,750-point savings on a peak-period partner Business redemption is among the highest-value uses available. Vouchers that go unused expire as 0 SEK of value.

Three: open-jaw routing should be the default for any trip longer than a long weekend. If your trip involves more than one destination, ending up at a different city than you started in is almost always cheaper to book and better to travel. EuroBonus's same-zone open-jaw rule covers more itineraries than people assume.

Bottom line

Three Business Class tickets to Southeast Asia over Christmas for 281,250 points combined is not a unicorn redemption that depended on a mistake fare or a hidden loophole. It is, however, a meaningful redemption — the kind that most EuroBonus members assume isn't possible during peak season and therefore never attempt. The trip exists because two Amex Elite vouchers were deployed against partner-airline Business redemptions, structured as two open-jaw bookings rather than one round-trip, and routed through SkyTeam hubs that release peak-season award space.

The trade-offs were real. Multi-stop routings instead of direct flights. Splitting the family across two outbound bookings on different days because Saudia would only release one Business seat per flight. Married-segment routing that required searching beyond the obvious options. None of that is glamorous on paper — but compared to the cash alternative for a family Christmas trip in Business to Southeast Asia, the trade-offs paid for themselves many times over. I'd book it the same way again without hesitation.

The structural piece most travelers miss is that the booking has to be planned around partner availability, not SAS availability. SAS metal disappears first for peak dates; partner inventory follows different release patterns and often surfaces options after SAS-direct seats are gone. The question for anyone considering a similar Christmas, summer, or Easter trip is whether you have voucher inventory worth deploying and whether you're willing to accept multi-stop routing for the trade-off in cost.

If you're sitting on EuroBonus points and Amex Elite vouchers and considering a peak-period family trip, the planning starts now — at least 6-9 months out for Christmas redemptions. Get in touch and I'll map current SkyTeam partner availability against your dates and travelers, and lay out a routing structure that fits the trip you actually want. Pricing is quoted per request, based on the complexity of the routing.