Four months ago I broke the news that you could redeem Hawaiian Miles for Virgin Atlantic Upper Class without fuel surcharges, thus saving thousands of dollars. See Redeem for Virgin Atlantic Upper Class without Surcharges.

You still can, but the party may be over. The old chart was a solid value and simple to figure out.

The new chart, hat tip to Gary, is much worse.

I don't have any information on what North America East and West are.

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 talked about transferring 10,000 Hawaiian Miles to 20,000 Hilton points.

Warning: I'm only 90% confident in the information in this post. It took several calls and a few hours on the phone talking to incompetent agents to get this information, so I'll provide it without triple-checking. I invite commenters to check my work.

Virgin Atlantic Upper Class is an incredible business class product by all indications.

Fact: I check eight frequent flier blogs daily. (Just dropped a ninth...)

One of those eight is Mileage Saver by Paul Walia. I love it because his posts take, on average, 10 seconds to read, and he covers all the easy ways to earn miles. The other day, he had a post on how to earn 400,000 Hilton Points in Five Steps.

Some of the cards mentioned in his post are Hilton cards, but some just feature miles that can be transferred to Hilton points.