There are a ton of Canada-to-Europe Star Alliance routes with better availability in economy and business class this summer than USA-to-Europe routes.

Connections from the US to Canada are easy to find, connecting in Canada generally leads to less flying than connecting in the US, and all airlines I can think of allow a connection in Canada between the US and Europe.

Since direct flight paths from the US to Europe cross Canada, connecting in Canada saves distance compared to connecting in the US.

What are the routes with award space?

Last year, United reduced its service to Buenos Aires. Across its entire system, United has only one daily flight to Buenos Aires, which leaves from Houston.

The U.S.

One of the most impossible premium cabin awards to find is now bookable!

Star Alliance carrier TAM has released excellent first class award space between its hub in Sao Paulo, Brazil and New York-JFK & Miami. In all my experiences at our Award Booking Service, I've never seen a TAM first class award seat....ever.

Check out the searches below using the ANA tool for two passengers. Both are during peak travel dates to South America: the World Cup this summer and in December when the weather is delectably hot.

Last month I booked myself an awesome award to the Maldives using AAdvantage miles and flying Etihad Airways Business Class.

American Airlines is offering two stackable promotions for buying AAdvantage miles that allow miles to be purchased for as little as 1.98 cents:

Get up to a 30% bonus on the miles you purchase until February 28, 2014.
Get a 10% discount on the price of miles until tomorrow February 6, 2014.

How do these promotions stack? How do these promotions compare to previous Buy Miles sales? Is this a price at which you should speculatively buy American Airlines miles?

The miles bonus is tiered.

Frontier has announced a 14% discount on domestic flights bought by February 6, 2014 and flown by March 12, 2014 with promo code SUPER. (Blackouts: February 13, 14, and 17)

This 14% discount does not apply to Frontier’s international destinations like Jamaica, Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic.

To get to those places, your best bet is to redeem 15k Frontier miles each way.

I was nervous that free oneways might be eliminated by United upon its new chart taking effect yesterday. There was a cryptic comment on the new award chart that stopovers on certain awards might require extra miles.

Free oneways rely on a stopover at your home airport to pull them off. If certain free stopovers were eliminated, free oneways could have been eliminated with them.

Yesterday, prices for award tickets booked with United miles surged for most routes as the devaluation announced last year finally took effect.

But the prices we're seeing on united.com aren't the prices I expected based on how United said the devaluation would work.

To review, United made its award pricing a lot more complicated by splitting its single award chart into two charts--one for awards on United planes and one for awards on partner planes.

In case your award flies both United flights and partner flights, United told us how to determine whether your award would price according to the

Update 2/4/14: Devaluation is live. It's different than we were told it would be.

Update at 3:18 PM: Some routes now show the updated price. For instance LAX-HNL is 22,500 in economy. Some routes don't. For instance ORD-FRA for today's flight in Lufthansa Business is showing 50,000 (the old price, new price is 70,000). And many searches show no results when there should be tons of results.