Because for me, miles are a means to an end: great travel experiences, I may occasionally post non-miles tips on the subject of great travel experiences. Feel free to add your own in the comments, or write a guest post.

I'm a one-bag evangelist. Whether I'm traveling for six weeks in East Africa or a month in Europe, I travel with a single carry-on sized bag.

I've uploaded a companion video to the famous Free Oneways on Delta Awards post.

Check it out, and take a look at the other videos I've uploaded.

This post is part of a series that will detail verbatim my negotiations with credit card companies to squeeze every last point and cent out of my cards.

Last August, I opened both the Citi AAdvantage Visa and Citi AAdvantage Amex at the same time to earn 150,000 American Airlines miles. The Visa had a spending requirement of $1,500 within four months to unlock its 75,000-mile bonus. After hitting that bonus, I moved on to unlocking the Amex's bonus then on to other cards.

I've added a new page to the top of milevalue.com: Meet Up. It's designed to increase the community nature of MileValue by facilitating meeting me in person socially or to talk shop.

There are five basic types of frequent flier miles. I'll detail each, including how best to take advantage of them. Then I'll explain why it's important to diversify across the types (not just across frequent flier programs.)

1) Region-to-region based miles. American, Delta, United, US Airways, etc

Region-to-region miles are the most common type of miles. These miles can be redeemed according to award charts, so a flight from North America to Europe costs a certain amount of miles regardless of where in North America and where in Europe and regardless of the (valid) routing.

As a companion to the mega-popular Free Oneways on United Awards, I've made this video of me booking such an award.

This is the 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.

I am going to the Chicago Seminars for frequent fliers, being held October 12-14 at an O'Hare Airport hotel.

Last week, I was working on a client's award from Portland to Seville, Spain with United miles. He had a tight availability range at the end of this summer, so preliminary searches of united.com proved fruitless: united.com was showing no availability from Portland to Seville in business class on his dates. Luckily I'm smarter than united.com, and you are too.

United.com is the best search award search engine of any of the US carriers, but it still has some flaws. It can find obvious routings through its hubs and its partners' hubs.

Introduction to Free One Ways (this post)
Master Thread: Free Oneways on American Airlines Awards (dead as of April 2014)
Master Thread: Free One Ways on United Awards
Master Thread: Free One Ways on Delta Awards
Master Thread: Free One Ways on US Airways Awards
Three Vacations on Two Awards

Did the title grab your attention? I'm actually underselling and overdelivering, since I'm going to show you how to get 3.5 vacations on two awards!

These free oneways that I've been writing about on United, Delta, and American are incredibly powerful.

US Airways and American Airlines have merged since the publication of this post so it is no longer valid.

The punctuation in this post's title is different than in previous posts on the subject of tacking free oneways onto awards. In the last week, I've shown how to add free oneways to your United, Delta, and American awards.