The Miles Professor

If you’re lucky enough to live on the West Coast, you can take advan­tage of one of my favorite British Air­ways Avios award travel oppor­tu­ni­ties: Flights to Hawaii on Amer­i­can Air­lines or Alaska air­lines for just 12,500 each way! That’s 25,000 miles for a round trip ticket. Most air­lines charge that for a round trip …

I recently got four new credit cards: two Chase cards (one busi­ness, one per­sonal), one Bar­clays Bank card and one Citibank card. With the Bar­clay­card Arrival World Mas­ter­Card and Citi ThankYou Pre­ferred cards, I put heavy focus on acquir­ing fixed-value points that are valu­able to redeem for any air­fare and act just like cash. I also continued …

What’s bet­ter than going on vaca­tion? Going on vaca­tion and stay­ing in a suite. How about a suite at a Hyatt or a Park Hyatt? These can get pretty pricey. For­tu­nately, there are plenty of ways you can get Hyatt suites and upgrades for free. I will dis­cuss four ways to pull this off so …

If you’re lucky enough to live in one of Amer­i­can Air­lines’ or oneworld’s inter­na­tional gate­way cities, a whole new style of award book­ing opens up for you. Every time you book a transcon­ti­nen­tal award trip, you have the oppor­tu­nity to add a free one-way ticket within North Amer­ica. This makes use of Amer­i­can Air­lines generous …

With many hotel chains, you book award stays by pay­ing with points already in your account. Not with Mar­riott Rewards! You don’t need to have enough points in your Mar­riott account to book an award stay. You can book an award stay online and col­lect the points later when con­ve­nient. Update: As pointed out by Gary Leff below …

The Pri­or­ity Club Point Breaks list came out today! These are prop­er­ties where you can book rewards nights for just 5,000 Pri­or­ity Club points until June 30, 2013. I pre­vi­ously wrote about how you can get any hotel on the list for $35 a night by using the cash and points trick sum­ma­rized in the fol­low­ing steps: Have …

I recently wrote about get­ting Svet­lana, aka Samba for Miles a flight on United p.s. Pre­mium Ser­vice Busi­ness Class so she can visit me in New York. The planes are actu­ally being revamped to two-cabin flights so she may get to fly in Busi­ness­First! But she needed a ticket back to LA (I’d love her to …

In the first part of my Price­line dis­cus­sion, I wrote a post about Price­line cov­er­ing the ins and outs of hotel bid­ding on Pri­cline: Price­line Hotel Bid­ding: How to Get Hotels at a Frac­tion of the Price. In the post, I cov­ered the ins and outs of fig­ur­ing out the hotel can­di­dates and bid­ding strate­gies. Priceline …

How to opti­mize Amer­i­can Air­lines AAd­van­tage off-peak award and take advan­tage of stopover rules in North Amer­ica to com­bine two one way-trips for a super miles deal. In my Top Five Ways to Fly to the Caribbean with Miles, Amer­i­can Air­lines made it as num­ber four. This is because of Amer­i­can Air­lines’ AAd­van­tage amaz­ing stopover rule …

Read about how we use United Mileage Plus miles to travel to Asia and arrange three girls with three dif­fer­ent itin­er­aries from three dif­fer­ent cities to three des­ti­na­tions in three dif­fer­ent coun­tries!! Whew. I have been to almost every coun­try in West­ern Europe. I lived in Aus­tralia for a year and vis­ited New Zealand twice. …

  My par­ents and sis­ter are going to Lon­don and the French Riv­iera in August! Read about how they got three tick­ets to Europe on United and Aus­trian Air­ways, four nights at the 5-star Hilton Lon­don on Park Lane and five nights at Le Meri­dien Nice across from the beach on the French Riv­iera for $862… …