Hey MileValue Family,

Many of you take the time to read each and every article we publish. For that, we are truly grateful. Some have even taken advantage of our free credit card consultations. But today I wanted to take the time to highlight one of our lesser known services, our award booking service.

One of the biggest challenges in points and miles is putting your miles to good use.

Until 2014, the best way to use miles to book a round-the-world (RTW) trip was to save a lot of one mileage currency and book a special RTW award with those miles.

What are your New Year's resolutions this year? If you've managed to stumble upon this blog, chances are somewhere in your list of goals for 2017 you've got some dream trips lined up. If you don't, you should.

Let’s talk about transferring Membership Rewards to airline partners for redeeming on domestic awards. This is part three in a series that will allow you to master redeeming awards within the United States, no matter what kind of points or miles you might have.

For those of you that have already read the first and second post in this series, you will notice repeat information at points in this post (as well as the rest of them to follow) because some of the airline partners overlap between transferrable points programs. 
“How to Maximize Domestic Award Redemptions” Series Index

How to

Avios are ideal for short, direct, economy flights, especially between regions on award charts.

This comprehensive spreadsheet details commonly used loyalty programs and their policies towards booking an award close to the travel date.

To see how much you might have to pay for booking a last minute award, look up the loyalty program whose miles you will use on the chart (which might not necessarily be the airline you fly).

I received the following email from a reader.

Dawn writes:
I wanted to ask a question that I didn't see an answer for on your site or clearly on the interwebs.
I am hoping to do a trip this winter to India.

I get questions all the time like this:
Hi, I have a million American Express Membership Rewards/Chase Ultimate Rewards/Citi ThankYou Points, what is the best transfer partner to go from [here] to [there.]
There are basically two ways to answer the question:

Look at award charts of all the points' transfer partners and then look for award space using the cheapest miles. I used this method to suggest to my friend that he transfer his Membership Rewards to Flying Blue miles to get from Denver to Tel Aviv.

This is a post I am writing to illuminate how my friend can get from Denver to Tel Aviv with Amex Membership Rewards.

I know most people just want to go somewhere and come back with their miles, but I am biased toward BIG trips. For the most part, the best way to book such big trips is as a series of one way awards with many different types of miles, taking advantage of the sweet spots with each program.