My brother and I had a trip to the Australian Open in mind and a cache of AA miles from the Citi card sign up bonanza. I had my flight to Australia booked (United Global First), but I knew the return would be tricky to book on my preferred flight, the direct Melbourne to Los Angeles flight on a Qantas A380.

Part of the problem was that January is peak travel time to and from Australia.

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.

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.

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 wrote about needing to find an award to Hawaii. I had found a return using Avios to fly on an American Airlines flight, but I still didn't have the flight to Honolulu.

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.

My brother and I have decided to enter a tennis tournament in Hawaii this July.

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.

My brother and I are going to Australia in January 2013 for the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne. He's got about ten days, and we decided to see Sydney, The Great Barrier Reef via Cairns, and Melbourne.

This is the second 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.

Last year, I signed up for two Citi AA cards and netted 150,000 AAdvantage miles.

You might have hundreds of dollars in free Southwest credits that are about to expire! If you have any old Rapid Rewards credits sitting around, you might be able to exploit them to save $158 like I just did.

This is the first post in a new series called Anatomy of an Award. Anatomy of an Award posts will talk about every aspect of the process of booking awards. Eventually I should have multiple posts on each frequent flier program.