I have already written a post about the rules of free stopovers on American Airlines awards

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

A few weeks ago, as part of my Anatomy of an Award series, I wrote about booking the award I'm flying right now: Los Angles to Paris with a stopover in Tampa. In this post, I'll talk about my domestic first class trip from LAX to Dallas to Tampa.

I traveled to the airport in my usual way, a limo from the casino.

This post is part of a series that will detail verbatim my negotiations with credit card companies to squeeze every last point and cent out of my cards.

Last August, I opened both the Citi AAdvantage Visa and Citi AAdvantage Amex at the same time to earn 150,000 American Airlines miles. The Visa had a spending requirement of $1,500 within four months to unlock its 75,000-mile bonus. After hitting that bonus, I moved on to unlocking the Amex's bonus then on to other cards.

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.

Hey there, you're reading an outdated post!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

This is the nineteenth 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 am writing this for an audience of people who know nothing about frequent flier miles, and my goal is that by the end, you know enough to fly for free anywhere you want to go.

Here are the basics of using aa.com for award bookings.

This post is part of a four-part series. In Part 1, we looked at the mechanics of the AAdvantage program. In Part 2, we looked at the mechanics of a stopover, including how to use them to get free oneway trips within North America. In Part 3, we valued specific AAdvantage awards. In Part 4, I’ll put a number on one AAdvantage mile.

In this post, I'll explain why I value one AAdvantage mile at 1.77 cents per mile, but your value will be different.

This post is part of a four-part series. In Part 1, we looked at the mechanics of the AAdvantage program. In Part 2, we looked at the mechanics of a stopover, including how to use them to get free oneway trips within North America. In Part 3, we’ll value specific AAdvantage awards. In Part 4, I’ll put a number on one AAdvantage mile.

Now that we understand the AAdvantage program, and in particular its stopover rules, it's time to value a few specific AAdvantage awards.

This post is part of a four-part series. In Part 1, we looked at the mechanics of the AAdvantage program. In Part 2, we’ll look at the mechanics of a stopover, including how to use them to get free oneway trips within North America. In Part 3, we’ll value specific AAdvantage awards.

This post is part of a four-part series. In Part 1, we will look at the mechanics of the AAdvantage program. In Part 2, we’ll look at the mechanics of a stopover, including how to use them to get free oneway trips within North America. In Part 3, we’ll value specific AAdvantage awards. In Part 4, I’ll put a number on one AAdvantage mile.

1) American Airlines has two region-to-region charts, one for travel on American Airlines and one for travel on its partners.

Below is a list of all possible North American international gateway cities when using American Airlines AAdvantage miles. Why are these important? As we'll learn in my series on the value of AAdvantage miles, when traveling on an AAdvantage award from North America to any other region, a free stopover is allowed at the North American gateway city.