Miles & More is running the “Friends Fly Further” contest exclusively via the Uptrip app from July 16 to August 16, 2025 – and may have inadvertently hinted at its active user numbers.
Prizes to win:
- 1st place: €1,000 flight voucher
- 2nd place: €700 flight voucher
- 3rd place: €300 flight voucher
- 4th–50th place: One Joker Card (if not already owned) valued 10€
- 51st place and below: Entry into a prize draw for Sennheiser Momentum 4 Lufthansa Edition headphones
Is Uptrip revealing active user numbers?
Since integrating Uptrip into the Miles & More ecosystem, the company has been boasting rapid growth. In a recent LinkedIn post, they claimed the app already has almost 200,000 users.
But the total number of registered users doesn’t tell us how many are actually active. Competitions like the one above can lead to more sign-ups, but may also reduce the ratio of active to total users. In fact, Uptrip may have (unintentionally) given us a clue about its active user base.
To see why, we need to look closely at the contest mechanics and understand the ranking system. Uptrip’s leaderboard is clearly based on two factors:
- Number of friends referred
- Time of the most recent referrals
This means:
- The more referrals you have, the higher you rank.
- If multiple users have the same number of referrals, the one whose most recent referral was earlier ranks higher. A later referral pushes you down the list.
Example:
You have 4 referred friends and rank #25. Someone with 5 referrals ranks #15. If you then refer a new friend (bringing you to 5 total), you drop behind the existing 5-referral user – maybe to #16 – because your last referral was more recent.
Since even participants with “0” referrals are listed in the leaderboard, the newest sign-up always appears at the very bottom. As the contest has been running for nearly a month, the position of the most recent participant can give us a pretty good idea of how many people have actively logged in and joined over the past four weeks.
I tested this with two friends who signed up back-to-back on August 13:
Conclusion and Estimated Active Users of Uptrip
It’s quite clear: Uptrip gives us a hint about its active user numbers. Both test accounts were placed near the bottom, just under position 15,000. In my view, this provides a fairly good indication of the number of active Uptrip users.
Of course, one could debate the definition of “active users” and rightly point out that not every user participates in a contest. Still, this particular competition was very prominently featured in the app and promoted via social media. The roughly one-month registration period also makes the data meaningful.
If we generously round up to 20,000 active users, this would imply a maximum activity rate of around 10%, which, in my opinion, is actually a pretty decent outcome.
