Today I am flying from Honolulu to Los Angeles on a flight operated by American Airlines. I bought my ticket with 12,500 British Airways Avios and $11 as described in this Anatomy of an Award. I listed 12,500 Avios and $11 as one of the cheapest ways to get to Hawaii recently.

Yesterday at 2:50 PM, when I got the email to check in, I did so.

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.

Etihad Diamond First Class looks like an aspirational award if I've ever seen one. Here's a YouTube promotional video of the suite .

When I skewered the British Airways Travel Together companion pass a few days back because of the gigantic out of pocket cost of the surcharges, a natural question emerged: how can you fly in British Airways First Class without paying $1,000 plus miles.

The short answer is to fly from Brazil to Europe with American Airlines miles.

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 love Avios. Avios have incredible uses like 4,500 Avios domestic trips within the US on American Airlines flights. Or how about combining an Avios award with an AA award to construct free stopovers outside the US on AA awards or to get almost free oneways to Hawaii.

But, I hate the surcharges that Avios awards entail. Surcharges of hundreds of dollars--in some cases more than $1,000--make Avios worthless to me for transatlantic and transpacific awards.

Luckily they don't charge surcharges on domestic awards on American Airlines.

Yesterday, I posted about getting free stopovers on American Airlines awards outside the USA. Hopefully I opened a few eyes, and I certainly caused some confusion. So I'll give a concrete example of getting a free stopover outside the USA on an AA award with screen shots.

This award will go from Los Angeles to Shanghai with a stopover in Tokyo.

A version of this post appeared today at hackmytrip.com. Thanks to that Scott for the opportunity to make a guest post. I invite my readers to check his stuff out.

Regular readers know that there are four rules to getting a free stopover on AA awards. The first one is:
1) Stopovers must occur at the North American International Gateway City. The North American International Gateway City is the last city in North America you fly out of on awards to other regions from North America. On awards from other regions to North America, the North American International Gateway City is the North American city in which you first arrive.

In my trip report of BA business from Tampa to London, I mentioned offhandedly that a lot of people could find value in AA awards with a stopover in the Caribbean on the way to Europe even after paying the $300 fuel surcharge for flying British Airways on an AA award.

Astute reader Francisco C pointed out that although one example I gave--LAX to Cancun, stopover, Cancun to London (and beyond)--was pricing as a free stopover on aa.com, the Caribbean stopover options I had claimed were possible were not booking as free stopovers.

Anatomy of an Award: Booking this Trip

AA First Class: Los Angeles to Tampa

BA Business Class: Tampa to London (LGW)

A Day in London: Gatwick to London to Heathrow to Paris

When booking an award with AA miles, you cannot select your seats on BA planes until 24 hours before departure. About 21 hours before departure, I logged into BA.com and gave my six digit confirmation code. Almost all the seats had been selected, but I still had some choice.

I checked the seatguru map for the plane I was flying, a 3-class Boeing 777.