United recently announced that they will commence service between San Francisco and Papeete, Tahiti (PPT) as of October 30, 2018. This is great news as it theoretically means more award space to a destination infamously hard to book an award to. At the moment, the only direct flights between the continental United States and Tahiti are on Air Tahiti Nui and Air France, both of which depart from Los Angeles.

Transferable points are points you earn from a credit card that you can transfer to many different types of airline miles or other points. They are valuable because they give you so much flexibility. Each airline program has strengths and weaknesses in terms of the number of miles you need and the availability from point A to point B.

JetBlue is offering a 15% discount on the base fare of all JetBlue flights (save those booked with points) flown between January 10 and February 14, 2017, as well as February 26 and March 14, 2018 and booked by the end of tomorrow. Flights on Fridays and Sundays are not discounted.

Hyatt has announced a few hotels that will go up in award price and one that will drop in price, effective as of 12:01am CST on December 13, 2017 (this Wednesday).

While not widely publicized, right now you can book flights within the United States or to Hawaii for less Alaska Miles in January or February than it would typically cost you.

There are various routes on sale, from short hops between Albuquerque and San Francisco to Hawaiian island routes like Honolulu to Oakland or Lihue to San Diego. Routes listed below are not the only ones on sale, but just examples (hat tip to Travel Codex for notice of the sale and the routes provided).

As time carries on Marriott and Starwood Preferred Guest are slowly altering their loyalty programs to prepare for integration. This morning Marriott announced a few new changes that will affect both Marriott and SPG members.
A Brief Catch-Up
Marriott and Starwood Preferred Guest have been in the process of merging since September 2016 when Marriott announced the purchase of SPG. We were given the ability to link accounts and transfer points between programs (3 Marriott points to 1 SPG Point and vice versa) and elite status match with impressive speed, immediately following the purchase.

Avianca LifeMiles is offering a bonus of up to 145% on purchased miles through November 27, 2017 (this Monday). You'll need to sign into your Avianca account to view the sale. You can buy up to 200,000 LifeMiles during the sale and get up to 290,000 bonus miles (for a max total of 490,000 miles). This is nearly as cheap as it gets. The cheapest I’ve ever seen LifeMiles was 1.32 cents each. But what sets this sale apart and makes it better than past sales is that bonus is not tiered.

Edit November 18, 2017: Three more positive reports in the last two weeks. This trick may never die. :)

In Don’t Pay the $75 Close In Fee on United (Trick!), Scott wrote about an easy way anyone can avoid the fee United charges non-elites for booking an award within 21 days of departure.

I'm a big fan of Alaska miles, because of the free stopovers on one way awards and great mix of partners from multiple alliances.
Alaska Mileage Plan Basics
Before we get into potential redemptions and stopover destinations, let's go over some basics about the program.

Partners

Alaska has a varied array of oneworld, SkyTeam, and non-allied airline partners:

Here are the award charts for flying Alaska and its partners.

LATAM and Cathay Pacific award space cannot be found on alaskaair.com. Search with British Airways award search engine instead.

As a reminder I'm bumping this post to the top of the blog since today is your last day to redeem United miles before the devaluation kicks in tomorrow!

Back in June I wrote about the changes United MileagePlus announced to go into effect November 1, 2017.