Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program knows that lengthening your orbit by small increments every periapsis is the most fuel efficient way to get a lunar intercept orbit. Since Kerbals don’t need food, water, or oxygen, I leave them up their for weeks sometimes doing these kind of maneuvers to save fuel.
There was a GEOSAT that failed to make orbit - a Hughes bird IIRC.
The used a lunar slingshot to get it to GEO with min fule burn..
The satellite, Asiasat 3, was launched last Christmas Day from Kazakhstan to provide television and telephone service in Asia. But the Russian-built Proton launching rocket malfunctioned, leaving the satellite in an orbit too low and too tilted relative to the equator to be useful. As is common in such cases, the satellite was declared a total loss and its owner, Asia Satellite Telecommunications Company Ltd. of Hong Kong, received a $200 million payment from a consortium of 27 insurance companies.
But engineers at Hughes, which built the satellite, said today that the gravity of the Moon could be used to put the satellite into an orbit around Earth where it could be used, though not for its original purpose.
Source - https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/30/us/trying-to-save-satellite-company-is-sending-it-to-moon.html