Aspire to Cathay Pacific Business Class.

It is one of the world's nicest Business Classes, featuring a fully flat bed on flights of up to 16 hours between the United States and Hong Kong.
It is dirt cheap at 55,000 American Airlines miles one way or 110,000 US Airways miles roundtrip. This is just 10% more than flying half the time in a far inferior product to Europe.
Award space is widely available.

An interview with me is currently featured at HotelsCheap.org. Excerpt:
What are the disadvantages of using [credit cards to earn miles]?
There are none if you are responsible.
If you are irresponsible with credit cards, don’t get them. There are two main ways to be irresponsible with credit cards.
1. You don’t pay the monthly balance in full. If you run a balance at 20 percent interest, any rewards will be quickly swamped. Just set your cards to be auto-paid from your checking account each month to avoid this.
2. You spend more with plastic than with paper.

US Airways off peak award space to Europe is wide open.

Chris won the drink passes. Stay tuned for more giveaways.

Generous reader Virginia wants to give away her two Southwest drink passes that expire December 31, 2014.

If you can use them between December 16 and 31 of this year, leave a comment.

From my vantage point reading comments on this blog, emails to me, and tweets @milevalue, I see a lot of mistakes being made in the collection and redemption of miles.

Five of these mistakes are being repeated over and over and are costing people a lot of dream trips.

The mistakes:

1. Starting at the Beginning
With miles, you want to start at the end. By that, I mean to figure out your dream trip and work backwards from there to figure out which miles are best for said trip.

I see this mistake manifest a lot of ways.

Last Monday, I flew from Medellin to Bogota to Buenos Aires in Avianca Business Class for 20,000 Singapore KrisFlyer miles and $45. (How I booked the award.)

The flights pleasantly surprised me. The main flight from Bogota to Buenos Aires was a six hour redeye, on which I wanted to sleep. The angled lie-flat bed was more comfortable than I expected.

I couldn't capture a great image of the bed. Image courtesy of http://www.the2milmoon.com/

How were the lounges, seat, bed, food, service, and entertainment?

Medellin
My trip started in Medellin.

Back in April, I won two tickets to a Capital Cities concert in Buenos Aires that came with a chance to meet the band and a cocktail reception for only 6,000 SPG Starpoints through an SPG Moments auction.

I went to the concert on Thursday and had a blast.

Not all miles are equal. My favorite miles are US Airways miles because US Airways has a cheap award chart and lax routing rules.