In Anatomy of an Award: São Paulo to Madrid in Iberia Business Class

Hilton's made a lot of changes to its loyalty program as of late. In the end of April, Hilton Honors added a brand new benefit for its members--the ability to pool points with other Hilton Honors members. You don't even need to share the same address!

This is super convenient if a friend or family member needs some more points for a specific redemption. You could pool your points with them now, and get them to share points back with you once they have more.

Alaska Airlines has added two new airlines to their lengthy list of partners recently.

Back in March of this year, Alaska added the German airline Condor. You can redeem and earn Alaska miles flying Condor. Even more recently, Alaska announced another new partnership: Finnair. You can't redeem Alaska miles flying Finnair yet but you can earn them when flying Finnair.

I'll focus more on Condor today since we don't know the redemption rates for flying Finnair yet.
Condor
Condor is a leisure airline.

American Express is known for having a few restrictions when it comes to applying for their credit cards.

One is that you are limited to holding four to five American Express credit cards. Both personal and business count toward this limit. (AMEX Everyday, Delta, and SPG are credit cards.) Separately, you are limited to holding four to five American Express charge cards. Both personal and business count toward this limit.

Credit card sign up bonuses, spending on credit cards/through portals, and earning via flying are the major opportunities to earn big chunks of rewards. But being a true miles and points enthusiast means taking advantage of even the little opportunities when you can, that only take a minute or two to sign up for and over time add up to big savings. Every penny--or mile--counts.

Here are two ways you can easily boost your balances this weeks.

Not long ago you saw us report on the prevalence of Etihad First Class Apartment award space available between Abu Dhabi and New York City.

It's really easy right now to earn a lot of American Airlines miles fast.

American Airlines has released a batch of Business Class award space to London (some totally lie-flat seats, some angled lie-flat) from many cities, January 2018 through the end of the calendar (April). This is news because American Airlines doesn’t normally have so much premium cabin award space, and the majority of the other award space bookable with American Airlines miles to Europe is on British Airways which incurs ridiculously expensive fuel surcharges.

I would act quickly if you want to book this award space, as much of it has already been snatched up.

The Citi / AAdvantage Platinum Select MasterCard is now offering 60,000 bonus American Airlines miles after spending $3,000 in the first 3 months.

The CitiBusiness / AAdvantage Platinum Select World MasterCard is also offering 60,000 bonus American Airlines miles after spending $3,000 on the card in the first three months.

The normal offer for each, is 30,000 AAdvantage miles for spending $1,000 on each and the standard "elevated offer" we see on each is 50k for $3k spend.