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.

There's an ongoing discussion in the miles-sphere about the value of a mile started when Gary and Ben disagreed about the value of a Hilton Point.

A few months ago I bought a ticket to the Chicago Seminars frequent-flier conference. I immediately booked my flights from LAX to Chicago.

On the way there, I went with a direct flight to Midway, so I could have easy access to the city for a night with friends before the conference.

On the return, I went with a Virgin America flight from O'Hare. Not only is the conference right next to O'Hare, but Virgin America has a better coach product than American or United.

At the time of booking, I snagged a good front aisle seat, 5D.

A few weeks ago I got this letter in the mail:

Always read your junk mail from credit card companies!

My offer is 3x American Airlines miles on purchases at supermarkets, restaurants, pharmacies, and gas stations up to a maximum of 2,500 bonus miles. Since I would normally earn 1x at those places on this card, I take it to mean that I get my first $1,250 at 3x miles.

I went to the website, typed in my "Invitation Number" and received confirmation I was registered.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post!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

This is the twelfth 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.

This is another post in my Anatomy of an Award series, in which I take a real award I’ve booked and break it down step-by-step to elucidate the award booking process.

Anyone without United status is charged a hefty $75 fee to book an award within 21 days of departure. There are two tricks to reduce or eliminate this fee.

Trick 1- Transfer your Ultimate Rewards to a Status-ful spouse's United account

Ultimate Rewards can be transferred to your United account or your spouse's.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post that's been removed!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

This is the tenth 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.

This is another post in my Anatomy of an Award series, in which I take a real award I’ve booked and break it down step-by-step to elucidate the award booking process. If you have a real award you’d like to write up in a similar post, please contact me, and you can write a guest post.

Yesterday, I talked about transferring 10,000 Hawaiian Miles to 20,000 Hilton points.