I recently booked an award for my parents that departed from their home--Charleston, South Carolina--to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We used a combination of their United miles and their Ultimate Rewards, transferred to United MileagePlus, to book the award in United Business Class.

Last month, Starwood Preferred Guest and Marriott announced category changes for their hotels. Marriott hotels on average got more expensive, but there were actually more SPG hotels that dropped in price than increased.

Update 3/16/17: Looks like TAP made a mistake and is now in the process of retracting their fuel surcharges. I believe the ban on fuel surcharges in Brazil is actually still in place, check out this post written by a lawyer, blogger, and travel consultant for more info (it's in Portuguese so just use a translator).  

The Brazilian government has decided to once again allow fuel surcharges on flights originating in Brazil.

Through March 15, 2017 (this Wednesday) at 11:59 PM ET, you can book roundtrips to Europe in Delta One for travel August through October for only 110,000 Delta miles. The standard price is 140,000 miles roundtrip.

This isn't a particularly earth shattering award price to Europe in a flat bed. You can fly United or American's Business Class for almost the same price any time you can find award space (price is 57,500 United miles or 57,500 American miles respectively).

A few weeks ago Scott posted about The Cheapest Ways to Get to Hawaii.

I recently came across another sweetspot to Hawaii I wasn't aware of. It costs just 17,500 Alaska miles to fly Alaska Airlines between the mainland United States and Hawaii. And for a little more (20k one way) you can fly Virgin America from a couple west coast cities to a couple different Hawaiian islands.

And since we're talking Alaska miles, you can book one free stopover per one way.

In March 2017, I went to Minsk, Belarus without a visa under the new program to allow citizens of more than 80 countries to visit the country for up to five days, which launched in February 2017.

Transfers of Citi ThankYou Points to JetBlue TrueBlue points will have a 50% bonus through 11:59 PM ET April 30, 2017.

This could be a very good deal if you have

I recently booked an award for my parents that departed from their home--Charleston, South Carolina--to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I tweeted this deal first from @MileValueAlerts. Follow @MileValueAlerts on Twitter and follow these directions to get a text message every time I tweet from that account. I tweet from @MileValueAlerts only a few times a month because it is designed to be used only for the best and most limited-time deals–like mistake fares–so that you aren’t bombarded by text messages.

Qantas, Virgin Australia, and United are offering cheap roundtrip flights between San Francisco/Los Angeles and Australia/New Zealand.

A few years ago I opened the U.S. Airways MasterCard from Barclays. It was one of my first travel credit card applications. Scott had given me the advice to sign up for the U.S. Airways card as well as the Citi AAdvantage cards, as it was 2014 and the companies were on the brink of merging. If I signed up for and met the spending requirement on both, the accounts would merge and I would be flush with American Airlines miles in no time. So I did.

Then my U.S.