Weekend Blitz

My sister, Elizabeth, is studying abroad in Argentina this semester and we just finished up booking a trip to visit her soon. I needed to book 2 tickets, one for me and one for McCown, and wanted to use either Delta SkyMiles or United MileagePlus miles. I really preferred to burn my Delta SkyMiles first, given their impending devaluation/restructuring in 2015:

I quickly ruled out United– they’re down to only 1 daily flight from the U.S. to Buenos Aires-EZE out of Houston-IAH and the award availability is pathetic, even in economy. The only other choice is to connect in Panama City-PTY using their Star Alliance partner, Copa Airlines, but that got pretty [...]

American Airlines is currently running 2 contests that could earn your some serious miles… if you win, of course:

1. American Airlines Buy Miles Sweepstakes – 1x prize of 500,000 AAdvantage miles

Don’t miss out on Marriott Reward’s Summer 2014 promo “Marriott Rewards Getaway Bonus”:

My targeted offer

The Deal

You’ll have to login to your Marriott account and head to the MegaBonus page to see your personalized offer. Here are a few of the offers you may get, all running from June 1 to August 31:

We’d been stockpiling United miles for months and had finally saved enough for 2x round-trip tickets in first class, a cost of 140k miles each. After some painstaking (but exciting) mapping, routing and time on the phone with United award booking representatives, our itinerary ended up looking like this:

By using United award miles, we were able to take advantage of their routing rules to have 1 free stopover, 1 free open-jaw and 2 long connections that allowed us enough time to explore the city (aka 2 more free stopovers).  It looked like this:

How did I just learn about this one?!

So, Club Carlson (Radisson, Country Inn, Park Plaza etc…) is offering a signup bonus of 85,000 points for getting their “Club Carlson Premier Rewards Visa Signature Card.” Their reward chart looks a little something like this:

…Which means that 85,000 Gold Points will get you nearly 10 free nights at any Category 1 Club Carlson property (85,000 / 9,000 = 9.4 nights). But, wait, that’s not even the best part: Club Carlson credit card holders get an added benefit “Bonus Award Night – When you redeem Gold Points for 2 or more consecutive Award Nights, your last night is free.” [...]

Hey travel-savvy friends, My fiance and I are planning a trip to Paris and Rome in September. We are working with a travel agent and she has us at a pretty nice hotel in Paris but the hotels she suggests are always so expensive. I’m all for staying in a nice place but it’s basically a place to sleep, right? For our hotel in Rome I’ve been looking into deals on hotwire and they have, what seems like, really reasonable prices for 4-5 star (much cheaper than anything our agent has offered.) Would y’all recommend going this route or is this risky for travel abroad? And how would you go about scheduling touristy things to do while there? Our agent says it’s [...]

Note: These are bookable now.. Don’t miss out on Flying Blue’s summer promo which allows you to book Air France/KLM awards for 25-50% less that normal in July & August 2014:

Award bookings on Air France/KLM routes have been reduced by 25-50% for travel between July 1 – August 31.

For those of us sitting in ‘Merica, we’ll be most interested in:

For those of you saying, “Enough already! How do you get started?” here’s a quick crash course on racking up the points required for a free trip. This is written from the perspective of someone with no frequent traveler points that is starting from scratch.

This is imperative to getting in on the free miles game. Start by reading our Credit Score Crash Course post here. This will give you an idea of what is behind your credit score.

Before going any further, figure out what you’re working with. Please don’t go to just any website for a credit report– there’s a reason [...]