My wife and I attended Oktoberfest in Munich for the first time in 2017 and had an absolute blast. The food, the beer, the music and the overall atmosphere made it clear that this wouldn’t be my last visit. As my father, who is responsible for my German heritage, approached retirement, I started to put together a plan to return with him next time.

My wife and I attend our first Oktoberfest in Munich in 2017.

TAP Air Portugal is the state-owned flagship airline of Portugal that made its first-ever flight from Lisbon to Madrid in 1946. They’ve been a Star Alliance member since 2005 and now operate flights to more than 90 destinations in 37 countries across North America, South America, Africa and Europe. The carrier’s main hub and headquarters are in Lisbon with secondary hubs in Madeira and Porto. 

If you’re from the United States, you may not have ever heard of TAP Air Portugal, much less are a member of the TAP Miles&Go frequent-flyer program.

LifeMiles is a frequent flyer program of Avianca, Colombia’s biggest and oldest airline. Avianca is one of the Star Alliance member airlines so when you earn or redeem LifeMiles, you have access to the biggest airline alliance in the world and its extensive networks. Theoretically, you can get anywhere in the world with LifeMiles. 

The program has lots of fans, but it’s not the easiest to use. Airlines don’t grant all of their partners the same access to award space, and LifeMiles’ website also leaves a lot to be desired.

If you’re looking for a solid, do it all travel card, then The Platinum Card® from American Express should be on your radar. This one card brings you great airport lounge access, hotel status, and more.

Let’s keep it short, because there’s a lot to get into with this great card and we’re going to take a deep dive into everything you need to know about the Amex Platinum.

The Basics of The Platinum Card from American Express

Before we dive deep into the perks of the Amex Platinum, we need to go over all the basics.

Marriott has announced major changes to its Bonvoy program. There were a couple of good things in today’s announcement, but overall, the changes aren’t positive ones with the announcement that they are eliminating their award chart in March 2022, and award pricing will instead be fully dynamic. 

The short story is that award pricing is likely to go up in most cases.

One of the often overlooked benefits of hotels’ co-branded credit cards are the free night certificates that many come with. In exchange for an often nominal annual fee, you're able to redeem these for a significantly subsidized (read: not truly free!) redemption if you're able strategize these well.

With many hotel programs extending the expiration dates on these free night certificates, many of us find ourselves with a number of certificates and looming expiration dates.

Similar to Disney’s “Big Hero 6” film, Turkish Miles&Smiles is easily one of the most underrated loyalty programs out there.

In years past, hotel or airline elite status was something unattainable for me. It was also something I didn’t particularly desire. For someone who prefers to stay at a cheap hostel rather than a five-star hotel, it just wasn’t a priority.

However, everything changed in 2020 when the thought of staying in a multi-person dorm while traveling made me want to sanitize every door knob I’d touched that day.

In 2020, I earned Marriott Platinum Elite status without much effort, and in 2021, I became Marriott Titanium Elite (to my own surprise).

This is part 2 of my travel report. My husband and I recently spent two and a half weeks in Greece so if you’d like to know what it’s been like traveling in Greece when it just reopened, how I booked our tickets and the COVID-19 restrictions, you can read part 1. 

Here I’ll cover the places and islands we’ve visited, where we stayed and some of my finds and must do things on each island, such as tours, activities and restaurants that we loved in each place.

Avianca’s frequent flyer program, LifeMiles, is a program many people love to hate. Yes, there is a somewhat quirky web interface, hard to reach customer service and often the program doesn’t show the same award space as other Star Alliance partners.