Reader @bitachu gave me an incredible tip the other day--at trivia night in Honolulu of all places--check out Virgin America's award chart for flights on Hawaiian Airlines.

Basically the chart is incredible and presents huge opportunity for mainlanders and Hawaiians alike whether they want to go to Hawaii or beyond.

Instead of just listing the chart, they have you type in your departure and arrival cities and spit out the number of Elevate points you need to book the award.
Nonetheless, I think I've figured out the underlying chart. Basically, it's a chart-plus-segment mechanism.

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I made a YouTube video called How to Add Free Oneways to American Airlines Awards to include in my Los Angeles Frequent Traveler University Presentation.

The video goes through using aa.com to perform award searches, how to use the multi-city booking tool, and other pertinent info for booking these awards online or by phone.

The video is a companion to Master Thread: Free Oneways on American Airlines Awards.

It is included in my slide show about booking free oneways that has been downloaded over 10,000 times.

I made a YouTube video called How to Add Free Oneways to US Airways Awards to include in my Los Angeles Frequent Traveler University Presentation.

The video goes through using united.com to perform award searches, the exact order of the searches you need to perform, and how to call US Airways to actually book.

The video is a companion to Master Thread: Free Oneways on US Airways Awards.

It is included in my slide show about booking free oneways that has been downloaded over 10,000 times.

The ultimate aspirational award may just be First Class on an Emirates A380 with its onboard shower.

Alaska Airlines has announced a partnership with Emirates, and has promised for most of this year that the award chart for awards booked with Alaska miles on Emirates planes would be coming in late 2012.

We are quite late in 2012, and the award chart has not been released, but the website has been updated to reflect a delay.

This is a bummer, but I'll keep monitoring the situation.

A lot of people read about incredible international business and first class beds, and they want to enjoy those beds on their next trip.

I was looking at some intra-Europe flights for my seven-week loop next summer. I had the brilliant idea that maybe I should oneworld-hub hop.

Munich to Berlin (airberlin)

Berlin to Oslo (airberlin)

Oslo to Helsinki (Finnair)

That would be all new cities for me and all direct flights. I priced out the Avios awards. Berlin to Oslo was 4,500 Avios and $45. That's a bad deal, since the same revenue flights are only $63.

I created a slide show for my LAX Frequent Traveler University presentation that I promised I would share with those who attended.

My presentation was called "Three Vacations on Two Awards: Free Oneways."

The only difference between the presentation and the show below is that I deleted the videos in the original presentation, which had no audio, and replaced them with videos with audio.

I've uploaded the presentation online RIGHT HERE.

Today I'm giving away a free oneway award on Southwest Airlines that must be flown by April 20, 2013. Specifically, I am giving away half of a standard award--a capacity-controlled award on Southwest Airlines. Standard awards are a relic of the old Rapid Rewards program.

Eight months ago, I converted 19,200 Rapid Rewards points to a Southwest standard award. I explained how to do that in How to Exploit the Southwest-Airtran Merger.

I did this because Southwest currently effectively operates two loyalty programs, a revenue based program and a chart-based program.

Two month ago Tahsir joined the MileValue Award Booking Service team. His joining brought much appreciated expertise and capacity. But even with him, we are overworked. The next step may be to train and bring in more help, but we don't want to rush into that because maintaining the quality of our work is our paramount concern.

As Tahsir says, we enjoy award bookings because everyone we help is so excited afterward. They've just booked a dream vacation.

Yesterday I posted about flying to Europe for 20,000 American Airlines miles year round--even during peak summer time--by adding a free oneway to your award that falls between October 15 and May 15. See 20k Miles to All of Europe All Summer.

Gary Leff commented on the post:
This is a glitch in how the website prices the award, rather than AA policy.