Or: Did You Earn United Status Without Knowing It?

I have Silver Status on United. See! ---------->

It just posted a few days ago even though my last paid flight with United was in March. What was happening? I had earned Silver Status in March, but United's errors--human and computer--had kept my status from updating to Silver.

There are two requirements to reach United Premier Silver status: accrue 25,000 Premier Miles and fly four United or Copa flights.

Yesterday I talked about how to book awards with layovers of up to 23 hours to see even more cities en route than would be allowable with normal stopover rules. Is it a good idea?

I'll review two recent 23 hour layovers I had, which were actually eight hours in London and thirteen in Frankfurt.

London

In London, I had to fly into Gatwick and out of Heathrow to make sure I could get an en route stopover in Tampa on an AA award.

Recently I had two clients of my Award Booking Service want to add a few 23 hour layovers onto their United award from Cleveland to South Africa. All the legacy US carriers have a rule in place that on international layovers, under 24 hours is just a layover, but over 24 hours is a stopover.

This distinction is crucial since no US carrier allows more than one en route stopover internationally.

Prologue

10 Through 8 and Honorable Mentions

7 and 6

5. Spend the Night on a Man Made Island in Lake Titicaca

Lake Titicaca is the world's highest navigable lake, straddling the border of Peru and Bolivia. It's a huge, beautiful, blue placid surface dotted with tiny islands that have been inhabited for centuries.

Lake Titicaca is at an even higher elevation than Cuzco, so take adequate precautions.

Lake Titicaca is ringed by incredibly unimpressive towns--Juliaca and Puno, Peru and Copacabana, Bolivia.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about US Airways secretly loading their off peak award space to South America. Check out that post for a full rundown of US Airways off peak awards, probably the best value out there for award travel.

Fact: I check eight frequent flier blogs daily. (Just dropped a ninth...)

One of those eight is Mileage Saver by Paul Walia. I love it because his posts take, on average, 10 seconds to read, and he covers all the easy ways to earn miles. The other day, he had a post on how to earn 400,000 Hilton Points in Five Steps.

Some of the cards mentioned in his post are Hilton cards, but some just feature miles that can be transferred to Hilton points.

Update: The trick in this post doesn't work anymore since American Airlines has eliminated all free stopovers on awards as of April 2014.

Yesterday's post greatly expanded the number of places you can get a stopover on American Airlines award by combining an AA award with a cheap Avios award. I'm sure many of your minds jumped to the big question: if you can get a cheap stopover almost anywhere, can you get a cheap oneway too? Yes!

We got great value out of the almost free stopovers outlined yesterday.

A version of this post appeared today at hackmytrip.com. Thanks to that Scott for the opportunity to make a guest post. I invite my readers to check his stuff out.

Regular readers know that there are four rules to getting a free stopover on AA awards. The first one is:
1) Stopovers must occur at the North American International Gateway City. The North American International Gateway City is the last city in North America you fly out of on awards to other regions from North America. On awards from other regions to North America, the North American International Gateway City is the North American city in which you first arrive.

Global Entry is an awesome service of the US Customs and Border Protection. Enrollees can bypass the sometimes horrific entry lines upon arriving at their US point of entry, using an automated kiosk instead of talking to an agent. Many frequent fliers are enrolled in Global Entry; I enrolled after my worst experience entering the country ever.

My Worst Ever Experience Entering the Country

Last fall, I hopped on a mistake fare that let me spend 12 days exploring Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras for $170. As is customary on my trips, I didn't bring a razor.