Sometimes airlines have seemingly interminable hold times before you can talk to an agent. This mainly happens during disruptions to the normal routine like a big storm that is causing a ton of rebookings or the United/Continental merger.

Here are some tricks to lower or eliminate your hold times:

1) Call the highest tier elite line. Elite lines are answered immediately or with a much reduced wait time.

If you're a top-tier elite, I'm sure you're already doing this.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post! The updated series from April 2015 can be found here.

This is the seventeenth post in a monthlong series. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post! The updated series from April 2015 can be found here.

This is the sixteenth post in a monthlong series. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete.

To everyone in LA:

Long-time reader Mark proposed dinner on Friday, September 7 at 8:00 PM, and I accepted.

I suggested an authentic Mexican restaurant in the 90006 zip code. It has chicken mole (read this word in Spanish, not English) and mezcal margaritas to die for.

Contact me if you want to join us, and I'll give you the name and address of the restaurant.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post! The updated series from April 2015 can be found here.

This is the fifteenth post in a monthlong series. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post! The updated series from April 2015 can be found here.

This is the fourteenth post in a monthlong series. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete. I am writing this for an audience of people who know nothing about frequent flier miles, and my goal is that by the end, you know enough to fly for free anywhere you want to go.

I like to earn miles for things I already do.

Per the LA Times, the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner routes will be:

Houston (IAH) to Amsterdam (AMS) starting December 4

Houston (IAH) to London (LHR) starting February 4

Los Angeles (LAX) to Tokyo (NRT) starting January 3

Los Angeles (LAX) to Shanghai (PVG) starting March 30

These are in addition to the already announced:

Denver (DEN) to Tokyo (NRT)

Houston (IAH) to Lagos (LOS)

Despite the announcement, united.com has not been updated to show the new aircraft on the routes.

I stumbled upon the news while researching a post about getting an award on the Dreamliner.

Also while researching the

Yesterday I talked about some great sweet spots on the US Airways chart for awards originating in South America. Maybe you thought that post was irrelevant for Americans.

But Americans can still get half the value of these sweet-spot awards by using open jaw itineraries.

US Airways sweet-spot awards can have tremendous value for Americans if they're employed as part of something I'll call a triangle award.

A triangle award is using three or more oneway itineraries to create a journey that includes two or more destinations.

Tom writes:

I've seen you mention wikipedia a couple of times when talking about building awards and figuring out where airlines fly - what exactly do you use wikipedia for?  Have you done a post about this?

I did write one post that touched on using wikipedia: Book Awards Like a Pro: Routing Ideas. But I'll answer the question of how I use wikipedia more fully.

For me, the two best places to get routing ideas are kayak.com and wikipedia.

I always like to scan award charts for sweet spots. I would define a sweet spot as one of three things:

An award that is much cheaper with one airline's miles than another airline's miles.  In this post I'll talk about EZE-BOG, CLO-BOG-EZE in Avianca business class costing 30k US Airways miles vs. 80k United miles.
An award that is much cheaper than a slightly different award on the same airline. And ideally the sweet spot award can be turned into the highly similar award cheaply.