When I skewered the British Airways Travel Together companion pass a few days back because of the gigantic out of pocket cost of the surcharges, a natural question emerged: how can you fly in British Airways First Class without paying $1,000 plus miles.

The short answer is to fly from Brazil to Europe with American Airlines miles.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post!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

This is the second 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'm rebooting the Free First Class Next Month series. It will basically be the same content as before, but the posts will be enhanced, updated, and reordered to improve them. See directly below this post for post #1.

My dad uncovered my first loyalty card ever. I would guess this is from about 1993, but I'm not sure.

Type in your name and email address here for a 20% off code for you (and a companion if you like) on a Virgin America flight.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post!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

This is the first 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.

Warning: I'm only 90% confident in the information in this post. It took several calls and a few hours on the phone talking to incompetent agents to get this information, so I'll provide it without triple-checking. I invite commenters to check my work.

Virgin Atlantic Upper Class is an incredible business class product by all indications.

I'm going to talk about a dilemma I rarely face--where to credit the miles earned by flying a paid ticket.

I'm busy preparing for the first ever live MileValue.com seminar in Honolulu that starts in 10 hours, so I'll summarize a few interesting nuggets you may have missed.

We all get jealous when we hear that other people have been targeted for better sign up bonuses than the best publicly available credit card offers. Thepointsguy has a way to check whether you've been targeted for any Chase offers lately.

I love Avios. Avios have incredible uses like 4,500 Avios domestic trips within the US on American Airlines flights. Or how about combining an Avios award with an AA award to construct free stopovers outside the US on AA awards or to get almost free oneways to Hawaii.

But, I hate the surcharges that Avios awards entail. Surcharges of hundreds of dollars--in some cases more than $1,000--make Avios worthless to me for transatlantic and transpacific awards.

Luckily they don't charge surcharges on domestic awards on American Airlines.

Recently I spent three nights in Krakow, Poland at two hotels. I'll be reviewing four hotels in Krakow, based on my stays and their location relative to where you want to spend time in the city.

Before I get to that, let me say that I highly recommend a trip to Krakow. First of all, it's in Poland which I found to be inexpensive, full of delicious food, and brimming with attractive people who spoke some English.

Of course, the English is not as strong as in western or northern Europe.

Yesterday, I posted about getting free stopovers on American Airlines awards outside the USA. Hopefully I opened a few eyes, and I certainly caused some confusion. So I'll give a concrete example of getting a free stopover outside the USA on an AA award with screen shots.

This award will go from Los Angeles to Shanghai with a stopover in Tokyo.