Best ‘Travel Is Free’ Posts & Resources (Best Of Blogger Series)

When it comes to learning about redeeming airline miles and the intricacies of loyalty programs in my opinion the gold standard is Drew over at Travel is Free. This is something that I am appalling at covering in any sort of depth and I constantly reference Travel is Free. Rather than doing a standard interview series, I thought it would be a lot more fun to share my favorite Travel is Free posts and then also get Drew to share some of the posts he thinks will appeal to you!

Contents

1 My Favorite Travel Is Free Posts
2 Drew’s Favorite Travel Is Free Posts
3 Thanks!

My Favorite Travel Is Free Posts

These are in no particular order, but these are some of my favorite’s along with a short explanation why.

Complete List of Airline Award Charts. Sometimes doing a quick google search doesn’t help me locate the award chart I’m actually looking for. By bookmarking this I can quickly see all the airline award charts and also easily see the chart for partner redemption as well.
Delta Miles Calculator. Type airport origin and destination and get the lowest price in miles. Very handy now they have removed their award charts.
List of Airline Stopover & Routing Rules. I generally have no idea what these rules are, so nice to have them listed in one spot.
Airline Alliances [Infographic]. Airline Alliances is something that is difficult to get your head around when you’re first getting started. This makes explaining them that little bit easier.
Best Use of Asia Miles (Cathay). This post isn’t a stand out favorite, I personally just love the “best use of <program> miles” series that Drew has created.

Drew’s Favorite Travel Is Free Posts

New United Stopover Series

When United changed their routing rules, basically to prevent all the crazy stopover posts I used to write about, on day 1 of the new program I started playing around and finding tickets nearly as crazy as the old routing rules. But this is exactly the kind of post I’m proud of – finding tricks and routing rules that literally no one at the time had written about (something DOC is great at).

In short, United made it so you had to book a roundtrip and return to the country of origin to get a stopover, and the stopover had to be in a single region, but I realized two things.

First, while the stopover had to be in the same region as the destination, you could open-jaw and start and end the “free segment” anywhere. Thus, you could fly to Europe, and then take a free segment within Africa, as an example.
Second, you could simply add a cheap oneway ticket at the end of your ticket to fullfill the roundtrip requirement.

For example, you could start in Hawaii, go to Asia, then take a free ticket… And then just add-on a 6,000 mile intra Hawaii flight and the ticket would allow the free segment.

The following entire ticket would be 45,000 miles in business class, because you pay for HNL-YAP, the intra Asia flight is free, and then you tack on a 6,000 mile economy flight at the end to meet United’s requirement:

So I wrote a series about it:

Alaska Stopover Tricks

Similar to United, I figured out a couple of oddities with Alaska miles.

Because Alaska allows stopovers on oneways, and has AA’s old off-peak prices, there are a number of good deals. But the fact that you could do two absurdly different tickets and lower the price doing it.

Here’s an example: Hawaii to US is normally 22,500 miles. But US (including Hawaii) to Europe is 20,000 miles in off-peak, winter. But the problem is that I want to go to Hawaii during winter and Europe in summer. But no fear, you can do both and get the lower price.

Do Hawaii to US (stopover) in winter, and then US to Europe in summer and pay only 20,000 miles.

That’s right, it’s cheaper to do Hawaii to US and then US to Europe than it would be to do Hawaii to US, and cheaper than US to Europe in summer. This saves miles on either ticket and gets you an extra trip.

(I actually discovered another trick doing this, and I’ll share with my newsletter soon).

Complete Map Series

Direct link to post

This is something I myself use, and I think others enjoy. This page has maps of the major hotel points chains and you can click any of them and filter the map to see any category… Show on the map only low category hotels to see how to best stretch your points, or show only high category hotels to see where to best use a free night certificate with a chain.

Resource Page

Direct link to post

I always felt like there should be one page where someone could go and find everything they need to know about miles. This page at the top has things like the list of award charts, chart of fuel surcharges, sites to search for award availability, and other tools… And then as you go down you can find Best Use posts, Complete Guides, etc…

It’s a long ways from the perfectly complete page I want it to be, but it’s a great page to bookmark to find a lot of tools.

Thanks!

Big thanks to Drew again for agreeing to participate and for all the quality content on the blog. Hopefully if you aren’t familiar with his site you go over and have a look around and if you are familiar you found something new that might be useful to you! Feel free to share your own favorite Travel is Free posts in the comments below. You can find Drew: