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US Airways and American Airlines have merged since the publication of this post so it is no longer valid.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

Today's post on tacking free oneways onto your roundtrip Delta awards generated a lot of interest, but I need to clarify a few things that spawned some confusion. If you haven't read that post, though, do so first. It's right below this post.

1. The distance between the open jaw cities needs to be less than than the distance of a oneway between your home airport and the roundtrip award's destination. Let me explain with examples.

The open jaw cities when you're adding a free oneway are the very first city in your itinerary and the very last.

After my popular posts about booking free oneways on United and American, this installment will focus on tacking free oneways onto Delta awards. This article presumes a knowledge of how to book free stopovers on Delta.com, which I covered here.

If you'll recall from those posts, we need two things to book any free oneway: a stopover and an open jaw. Luckily on its awards, Delta offers both a stopover and an open jaw.

JetBlue, my favorite coach cabin in the world, and Southwest are both having one day sales that end today, May 15, at 11:59 PM ET.

First the JetBlue sale: Here's a complete list of the city pairs with fares on sale. If you want to fly one of those routes between May 22 and June 21, the deals are generally pretty good. Click on a city pair for black out dates and day-of-the-week restrictions.

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.