Samir asks:
Hi Scott,
     I discovered your blog recently and am loving it. Your miles-related knowledge is pretty impressive and I most definitely appreciate the tips/advice I have gotten from your site so far. Needless to say, I have started reading your site daily. 
     Anyway, I have an issue that I was hoping you could help me out with. Last summer, I signed up for the AMEX Premier Rewards Gold card when it had a nice signup bonus at the time.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post! The updated series from April 2015 can be found here.

This is the second post in a monthlong series. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete.

I'm rebooting the Free First Class Next Month series. It will basically be the same content as before, but the posts will be enhanced, updated, and reordered to improve them. See directly below this post for post #1.

My dad uncovered my first loyalty card ever. I would guess this is from about 1993, but I'm not sure.

Type in your name and email address here for a 20% off code for you (and a companion if you like) on a Virgin America flight.

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.

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.

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.

A few days ago, I talked about how to book free stopovers online on United and American awards. This post is about booking free stopovers on Delta. Just as the other posts were preludes to booking free oneways online, tomorrow I will describe how to book free oneways on Delta awards. It will involve booking free stopovers online, so read this post carefully.

Delta is the only airline that allows free stopovers on domestic flights, so I'll show an example of that.

This post is part of a four-part series. In Part 1, we looked at the mechanics of the Delta Airlines program. In Part 2, we looked at its award chart and rules to find valuable awards. In Part 3, we valued specific SkyMiles awards. In Part 4, I’ll put a number on one SkyMile.

In this post, I’ll explain why I value one SkyMile at 1.22 cents, but your value will be different. To start I’ll go back to the values for the redemptions I found in Part 3.

This post is part of a four-part series. In Part 1, we looked at the mechanics of the Delta Airlines program. In Part 2, we looked at its award chart and rules to find valuable awards. In Part 3, we’ll value specific SkyMiles awards. In Part 4, I’ll put a number on one SkyMile.

Now that we’ve looked at the rules of the SkyMiles program, and we’ve looked at the chart to find some valuable awards, we’re going to value specific awards.