Until December 20, 2014, you can buy Alaska Airlines miles for as little as 2.19 cents each.

The sale is structured as a bonus on the normal number of miles you'd receive. The bonus is tiered, so the biggest 35% bonus comes from purchasing 35,000 to 40,000 miles at the normal price of about 2.96 cents each after tax.

To buy 47,250 miles (35,000 + 12,250 bonus) during this sale costs $1,034.69, which is 2.19 cents per mile.

Regular MileValue readers: ignore this post. It’s about college basketball, not miles.
UVA fans: ignore this blog. It’s about traveling free (in first class if you want) by efficiently collecting and redeeming frequent flyer miles, hotel points, and credit card points. If you don’t want to ignore that, start here.
Series So Far

Who I Am & Game 1
Games 2 & 3
Games 4 & 5 (this post)

Game 4, 72-62 Win vs. Sant Julia All Stars
Game 5, 85-49 Win vs.

Machu Picchu is one the few places in the world that can't be over-hyped. Seriously, no matter how high your expectations are when you get there, I don't think you can be disappointed.

Even on my third visit, watching the sunrise over the mountains was spectacular.

So how do you get to Machu Picchu with miles?

It's actually very easy. The best miles to get to Machu Picchu are American Airlines miles. You can fly to Cuzco, the nearest airport, roundtrip for 35,000 American Airlines miles.

I was eating a burrito at an obvious Chipotle knockoff in Bogota, Colombia (Sipote, it's awesome), and when I moved my tray, I noticed I had been sitting at a Citi ThankYou Points sponsored table.

Generally we Americans have by far the best credit card and frequent-flyer-mile-earning options, but ThankYou Points and Membership Rewards are offered to people around the world.

The program here in Colombia looks remarkably similar to what Citi offers Americans.

First, I can clearly see the Citi ThankYou® Premier Card on the table, which was actually the card I bought my dinner with to earn 3x

I asked longtime award booker and occasional blog contributor JB to write about a very interesting Delta award he just booked.

A lot of people think Delta miles are worthless, but there are no other miles that could book a single convenient award with long stops in Tahiti and Sydney plus an overnight in Auckland.

A client contacted the MileValue Award Booking Service requesting a slightly modified version a MileValue classic: Tahiti, New Zealand & Australia on One Trip Using Delta Skymiles.

She had tried another award booking service that failed to convince Delta to book the award.

Aer Lingus, a partner of United MileagePlus and British Airways Avios, debuts a Washington-Dulles to Dublin route on May 1, 2015.

We are less than two months from 2015, and what I'm most looking forward to is being able to book one way awards with Delta SkyMiles. The 2015 award chart is already published and no Saver awards are going up in price.

Here are the roundtrip business class prices next year. One ways will be half the price.

I have booked myself only one SkyMiles awards in the last three years, and the big reasons is that one way awards are often most convenient for my travel style.

United miles are the best to Europe, though the routes with gold mine award space for Summer 2015 might surprise you. For Summer 2014, I wrote Route from the US to Europe via Canada for Better Award Space, and I decided to check back in on some of our old favorite routes to see if they were again gold mines for 2015.

The answer is a resounding yes.

Are you better off using Avios or American Airlines miles for a trip to South America?

I'm at the beginning of probably nine months of travel, with almost no flights booked and only the vaguest sense of where I'll head and how I'll get there.

Off peak awards allow us to stretch our miles further by booking discounted awards to select regions during certain pre-determined dates. Off peak awards are offered by several airlines, and this post will put all the off peak awards I know of in one place.

While off peak awards are often less desirable dates, there are some off peak dates that are actually my favorite times to visit a country.