Weekend Blitz

Delta SkyMiles is notoriously one of the worst frequent flyer programs to use for award travel. The seat availability for award travel is slim, their website is buggy/broken and it’s difficult to book seats on SkyTeam partner airlines with Delta SkyMiles. These things said, it’s not at all impossible to book award travel on Delta–it just takes longer and requires you to have more flexibility. This series will help you understand how to squeeze the most amount of value out of your Delta SkyMiles. 

The list goes in order of Delta hub size and therefore, number of flights offered. I recommend starting with the hubs first because [...]

Pros: RailEurope.com is a good resource for researching entire rail network in Europe and is the only place to book a multiday rail pass that covers numerous countries and service providers

Cons: If just booking a simple roundtrip or one-way ticket, it can cost 20-40% more than going direct to the train website

When planning our France trip, we needed to book about 3 train tickets to get us from CDG-Bordeaux, Bordeaux-Nantes and then Nantes-Paris. So, when trying to research the best way to book, we checked out all the venues, starting with RailEurope.com.

We were looking at taking the 11h05 [...]

I had a reservation at a Sheraton property that I made many weeks ago at the Fed/Gov’t rate. On the morning of my check-in date, I received a call from the hotel manager explaining that they were overbooked for the night and were starting by calling all SPG Platinum/Gold members to see if they would be willing to accept Starpoints for having their reservation cancelled. He said that they’re offering 7,000 Starpoints for volunteers (this is equal to 1 free night at the property)–I paused and thought about my travel plans:  they were, in fact, flexible and I didn’t have to stay at that particular property.  Suspecting that they [...]