Etihad’s Five Million Mile Competition Rule Change Leaves Members Frustrated

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how Etihad crowned the winner of its “Extraordinary Challenge,” a competition that was launched earlier this year, encouraging Etihad Guest members to travel on the carrier’s 15 newest routes. The prizes were big, with the first place winner earning five million miles.

While this was no doubt a creative competition that had the potential to be lucrative, a lot of members are finding themselves to be quite frustrated by a major rule change that was made well into the competition, so I’d like to talk about that a bit in this post, as I find this all to be quite strange.

How Etihad changed competition rules in major way

Etihad Guest’s Extraordinary Challenge competition was based on flying to the carrier’s 15 newest destinations the fastest. However, among the people who completed the task, the tiebreaker for this changed over time.

When the competition first launched, in May 2025, here’s what was stated about how a winner would be selected (bolding mine):

The winner(s) will be assessed based on the number of tasks completed and the cumulative time taken to complete them, i.e. which Entrant(s) was found to have: 

(i) completed all of above requirements (A), (B) AND completed (C) flown to all Required Destinations in the shortest cumulative time AND (D) was enrolled as participant to the competition for the longest period of time (i.e. Entrant who made the earliest enrollment into the competition from when it went live on 26 May 2025).

Initially I was a little confused by the use of “shortest cumulative time.” As I interpreted it, that basically suggested that the winner would be the person who flew all 15 routes in the shortest cumulative time period, rather than traveled to the 15th destination first. I never thought that was the intent, as it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But as it was widely believed by participants, what mattered was that you took the inaugural flight of the 15th route, and then the tiebreaker would be the person who enrolled in the competition first.

Then in July 2025, several weeks after the competition started, Etihad quietly changed the terms & conditions, to instead state this about selecting a winner (bolding mine):

Winner(s) will be selected based on who is the first to complete all tasks (A), (B), and (C), starting from the campaign launch date (i.e. 26 May 2025). The time taken for an Entrant to fly, to or from all Required Destinations, is calculated based on the scheduled flight departure time in GMT.

If two or more Entrants complete all the Required Destinations at the same time (ie. completed flying to the 15^th destination), the tie breaker will be determined by who amongst them was the first to book the last qualifying flight to 15^th destination. If still tied, it will be based on the 14^th qualifying flight, and so on, until the tie is broken.

So this does strike me as a pretty major rule change — essentially the tiebreaker went from being the person who registered for the promotion first, to being the person who booked the 15th flight first. Etihad also didn’t actually explicitly tell members about this rule change.

Now, the added irony in all of this is that Etihad actually postponed its 15th inaugural flight, which was to Algiers (ALG). That route has now been suspended indefinitely, and it’s anyone’s guess when it actually launches. The competition officially runs through May 2026, so one would assume that Etihad won’t actually launch the route before then.

@_ben.voyage is one of the people who shared his experience, and he has been participating in all of the gamified airline loyalty program promotions we’ve seen in recent times. He was left frustrated by the outcome and how this was handled, and in particular, the lack of communication about it:

The most disappointing part is that when they made this rule change, no one—myself or any of the fellow finalists I spoke with—was informed. No email, no call, no text. For a major company running a high-stakes competition, a complete failure to notify participants of a critical rule change is truly unheard of and, I think, inexcusable. Small websites notify their customers of T&C updates; Etihad should have done the same.

On the plus side, he has a really cool takeaway from the competition:

I want to be clear: I don’t regret doing this. The miles were simply extra gravy. The real prize for me was the journey itself. My greatest moment in completing this and the other challenges is being a living proof that these insane aviation feats are possible—and that is solely thanks to the hard-working people in the aviation industry who made the hundreds of flights I took safe and efficient. They deserve more recognition than I do.

Through all this travel, I found my true calling: I want to be a commercial pilot. I watched the many different pilots operating my flights this year, and I have immense respect for what they do. I can truly see myself enjoying the lifestyle. Just like these challenges, becoming a pilot will be a marathon, not a sprint, but I’ve found my new life’s challenge. Finding this new goal is the single greatest outcome of the “Extraordinary Challenge,” and I can’t wait to transform 180 degrees to achieve this seemingly difficult goal.

My take on the rule change to Etihad’s competition

I have a few thoughts on this Etihad Guest competition, and how this was handled.

First of all, as you’ll see in the terms & conditions of virtually anything related to an airline loyalty program, the company technically claims to have the right to change anything without notice, so in that sense, there’s very little accountability with these kinds of promotions.

Second, all too often we do see loyalty programs change the terms of promotions, as they seemingly don’t always do a great job anticipating how things will go. With similar challenges from JetBlue and Turkish Airlines, we’ve also seen some minor changes to the rules or registration policies, so this seems like the norm rather than the exception.

Third, it’s puzzling to me how Etihad Guest’s published terms for the promotion never really made sense, and for weeks, the company didn’t want to clarify. “Shortest cumulative time” just seemed like a strange term to use, since I don’t think it reflected the intent. In other words, presumably Etihad wanted people to take all flights as soon as possible, rather than to bunch all 15 routes into as short of a period as possible.

But no matter how you slice it, Etihad materially changed the rules — the tiebreaker went from being first to register for the promotion, to being first to book the 15th flight (which never even ended up happening, but that’s a different story). I don’t understand why rules would be changed in such a meaningful way, especially after so many people had invested a lot of time and money into participating…

Bottom line

Etihad Guest ran a fascinating “Extraordinary Challenge” competition, whereby one traveler taking 15 of the carrier’s newest routes would earn five million bonus miles, in addition to a bunch of other prizes.

However, Etihad changed the rules of the competition weeks after launch. Initially, the idea was that the tiebreaker would be the person who registered for the promotion first, while with the change, the tiebreaker became the person who booked the 15th flight first.

It’s strange to change rules in this way so far into the competition (especially without letting members know), so I can understand how this is leaving some people frustrated.

What do you make of this Etihad competition rule change?