Searching for award space can often be an exercise in frustration. The dates you want don't have availability and premium cabin seats are often scarce. There is nothing in the world, however, more frustrating than phantom availability. You think you've found your dream trip only to have the rug yanked out from under you.

We recently received a request through the Award Booking Service where this came into play. A family of four was looking to travel from New York to Johannesburg, Africa in July using their US Airways miles.

You can use delta.com to search Delta, Virgin Australia, Air France, KLM, Korean, and now Alitalia space. Korean space isn't searchable anywhere else. Virgin Australia space isn't convenient to search elsewhere.

Hey! You're reading an outdated Free First Class Next Month series. Check out the latest version published in April of 2015 here.

This is the seventeenth post in a monthlong series that started here. 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.

This is the second part of a multi-post Anatomy of an Award series about American Airlines Explorer Awards, which are ideal for around-the-world trips, trips with multiple destinations, and other "trick" itineraries. Previously: The Rules

A client contacted the Award Booking Service wanting to book an around the world trip with American Airlines miles.

This is the first part of a multi-post Anatomy of an Award series about American Airlines Explorer Awards, which are ideal for around-the-world trips, trips with multiple destinations, and other "trick" itineraries.

American Airlines Explorer Awards are an incredible value with three main uses:

around-the-world (RTW) trips
trips with many destinations in one region
combining multiple trips within one year onto one Explorer Award

When I say "incredible value," I mean 150,000 miles to go around the world with ten stops in business class.

Singapore Airlines is probably one of the best airlines in the world.

I've had the privilege to fly Singapore Airlines almost 2-4 times a year since I was born. I was even one of the first "children" to fly the nonstop LAX-SIN flight which was then dubbed as the A345 Leadership. Although I always flew in Economy, in the next few days, I'll be flying Singapore's Suites product from Singapore-Los Angeles. I've dreamed of this day since I first knew what the First Class product looked like.

By now, you may be well aware of the rule that on a United oneway award, you can't take a stopover. On a roundtrip award, you get one stopover. (This is just for awards booked with United miles.

One of the most frequent requests we get for our Award Booking Service is finding premium cabin tickets between the US and Australia/New Zealand.

The application links for the cards mentioned in this post have been removed because they are expired.
Click here for the top current credit card sign up bonuses.

Full offer details on the 40k bonus mile Frontier card offer:

0% Intro APR on purchases and balance transfers for the first 12 months.

I started this series of posts about booking your trip to Europe for summer 2013 with a post about booking business class. This post will focus on booking an economy class award.

If you want to fly economy class this summer, I recommend getting some American Airlines miles. There are two main reasons:

All the legacy carriers--American, Delta, United, US Airways--charge 60k miles roundtrip to Europe in economy class. But I've outlined a trick that I'll repeat here to get your AA award for 50k miles.