The year-long gift shower includes free flights, bonus miles, discount vouchers and more…

The UAE is turning 50 this year, and obviously, that is a big deal. As the National Carrier of the UAE, you’d expect Etihad to be bold, extravagant, maybe even a little ‘extra’ with their celebrations, but giving away 50,000 prizes is a galactic escalation of our expectations.

To give you some sense of scale, you could give a prize to every single resident in Umm Al Quwain and still have plenty of leftovers. If those 50,000 prizes were individual shawarmas, and you stacked those meaty wraps on top of each other, one after another they’d reach a height equivalent to 18.5 Burj Khalifas — 15,000 feet above the height that regular commercial airlines fly at.

Which neatly brings us back to Etihad, and their ‘year of the 50th’ giveaway, which almost certainly doesn’t include shawarma. Might want to work that into the centenary year festivities guys. Just sayin’.

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What do prizes mean?

Points! Well that’s one of the things that’s being given away over the course of the year, free bonus Etihad Guest Miles. There are also free flights, “discount vouchers for experiences across Abu Dhab” and more.

How do you win these prizes? As yet, the Etihad website does not have any clear instructions on how winners are selected, but there is a prompt to join their newsletter database, which will mean you’ll be one of the “first to hear about … exclusive offers and competitions”.

A big year for Etihad

We’ve already had some lovely gifts this year from Etihad, mainly in the form of flash sales to destinations like Morocco and Switzerland, Maldives and Seychelles. They’ve also extended their free global wellness cover until the end of September 2021, they were also the first carrier in the world to get all their aircrew inoculated, which is, we guess, the gift of peace of mind.

In 2021 the airline completed the first scheduled flight between Abu Dhabi and Israel, they’ve expanded ways to earn and burn their Guest Miles and all tickets purchased in the UAE include pre-flight tests.

Images: Etihad