Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to check Delta's award availability from Los Angeles to Honolulu. I have checked in the past and seen literally zero low-miles-price award seats from Los Angeles to Honolulu for 330 days.

To my great surprise, there was great award availability from Los Angeles to Honolulu, but only at certain times and in certain cabins.

Where's the space?

Delta has three tiers of award availability: low, medium, and high. We only want the low miles price, but Delta is by far the stingiest US-based airline about releasing low level award availability.

You can do some cool things with Delta SkyMiles.

Hot on the heels of yesterday's Top Nine Credit Card Offers That Are About to Disappear, American Express has increased the sign up bonus on the Platinum Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card to 55k SkyMiles and 20k Medallion Qualifying Miles after spending $5k in the first three months of cardmembership.

That means most people can get over 100k SkyMiles from only two cards, enough for a roundtrip business class award to Europe.

How can you get the deal? What are Medallion Qualifying Miles?

The current best deal is this offer for the Gold Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card from American Express

Earn 30K bonus miles after you make $1K in purchases on your new Card within your first 3 months and a $50 statement credit after you make a Delta purchase with your new Card within your first 3 months.
Earn As You Spend: Get 2X miles on Delta purchases and 1X miles for all other eligible dollars spent.
Check your first bag free on every Delta flight - that's a savings of up to $200 per round trip for a family of four.

I recently booked a family of four an economy award from Miami to Buenos Aires with their Membership Rewards. It was an interesting award that I think demonstrates the complexities and fun of booking with American Express points.

I won't talk about that award specifically, but I'll use it as a jumping off point for discussion since it illustrates a typical Memberhip Rewards situation.

Award travel reservations can usually be made up to eleven months in advance. Often, but not always, eleven months out has the best availability. Eleven Months Out is my new series looking at what you can book today for travel in eleven months. (This post is one month late, since New Year's Eve is only ten months out.)

New Year's Eve at Sydney Harbor is on my bucket list.

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 You're reading an outdated Free First Class Next Month series.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 twenty-third 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.

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.

For many people, the most aggravating travel fees are out-of-pocket fees charged on frequent-flyer-mile award tickets. At least that's my impression from reading the comments on this New York Times article I was quoted in. Huge government taxes and fuel surcharges can make what should be a free ticket cost hundreds of dollars per person. People were furious about paying $600 for a "free" economy ticket.

And why wouldn't they be? Most people think award miles get you a free ticket like they used to.

Several months ago, American Express had a very limited time offer of 70,000 bonus SkyMiles for signing up for the American Express Delta card. Delta miles aren't worth as much to me as miles from American, United, US Airways, Frontier, Southwest, Virgin America, or many other airlines, but 70,000 miles is a lot--especially since the normal bonus is 30,000 miles.

I jumped at the chance, and I was approved for the card.