My friend, Ryan from MA, recently took a trip to Italy and Taiwan during which he flew Lufthansa First Class, Asiana First Class, Thai First Class, ANA First Class and entered some of the world’s nicest lounges. I’ve asked him to do a series of trip reports, so we can all be inspired by some of the otherwise out-of-reach experiences miles can afford us. This is the first trip report on Lufthansa First Class.

After 5 days in Rome and 1 day in Bologna, my wife and I took a short Lufthansa business class flight from Rome to Frankfurt.

Have you ever been mad at an airline? You probably called customer service, filled out an online form, or tweeted the customer service team.

Not Hasan Syed.

According to Yahoo!:
[Mr.

If you apply for both the personal and business card today, you'll have 60k Starpoints after meeting the minimum spending requirement after meeting the minimum spending requirement of $5k per card in the first six months.

American Airlines' website is a great place to search for oneworld award space, especially on oneworld partners such as airberlin, Qantas, and Finnair. American's site is also useful for searching award space on non-oneworld partners like Hawaiian and Alaska. Scott wrote up a good introductory post on AA.com earlier this month.

This brief post will show you a quick tip on how to search for nonstop award segments on AA.com.

How do you manipulate aa.com to show only non-stop results? When would you want to do this?

American's site is intuitive and displays accurate award space.

Update: Several--if not all--of these offers have expired.

I am a lodging cheapskate. My ideal trip length is four weeks, so hotel bills would add up quickly. Right now I haven't been in the US since February, so I've had to come up with creative ways to sleep cheaply.

But just because I'm a cheapskate doesn't mean I don't want to stay at fancy hotels sometimes too. I'm jealous that Rookie Alli has two nights at any Hilton worldwide.

Update: American Airlines got rid of its RTW awards, so the best way to book RTW awards now is elucidated here.

Key Links:

Citi® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® MasterCard®
Starwood Preferred Guest® Credit Card from American Express
Starwood Preferred Guest® Business Credit Card from American Express
Explorer Award chart (eliminated April 2014)
Explorer Awards: The Rules (eliminated April 2014)

Combined, the cards offer enough American Airlines miles for a round-the-world business class award with up to 15 stopovers.

You could take this trip in business

American Airlines has a great promotional award price to Hawaii this fall of only 15,000 miles each way in economy if you book by September 13 and fly September 11 to December 17.

American has several services to Hawaii.

Honolulu <-> Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago
Kahului <-> Dallas and Los Angeles
Kona <-> Los Angeles
Lihue <-> Los Angeles

How good is this deal? Are there currently better deals to Hawaii?

If you have a stash of Star Alliance frequent flyer miles, United.com is a great place to start planning your award trip, but it's far from perfect.

I've detailed in the past how United's site will display "phantom" availability. Award space displays as bookable, but when you attempt to reserve the space online you will receive an error message. Then if you try to call in to book the trip--whether with United or another Star Alliance partner's miles to book the trip (e.g.

Fuel dumping, at least among people searching for a deal, is the practice of purchasing a ticket in such a way that fuel surcharges are not added. Paid tickets have three components: base fare, government taxes, and fuel surcharges.

On some tickets, the majority of the price is made up of fuel surcharges, so dumping them from the price makes the ticket far cheaper.

Here's page 712 of the FlyerTalk thread on the topic if you want to know more.

Two days ago, American Airlines added fuel surcharges to Malaysia Airlines awards.