Travel Miles 101 Roundup – Week Ending 11/6/15

We know you don’t have time to read the hundreds of travel rewards articles published every week, so Alexi and I try to cut through the noise and curate only the essential information for you to easily digest.  Here’s our roundup for the week ending 11/6/2015:

Essential Reading:

The most informative articles we came across this week:

• One Mile at a Time: Using Iberia Avios as an Alternative to British Airways – In the wake of the recent BA elimination of the 4,500 Avios flights to/from the US, this is especially valuable information.  This article might take a few readings to fully comprehend, but it is well worth your time and you might find a sweet spot you didn’t know existed (like I did for my RIC-LGA flight on AA!).
• Million Mile Secrets: How To Avoid British Airways Flights When You Search For Award Seats – Whether you are using British Airways miles or American Airlines miles to get to/from Europe, you need to go out of your way to avoid actual British Airways flights as you will get hit with hundreds of dollars of “fuel surcharges”  This article gives you strategies to avoid BA flights, and don’t forget that if you are searching for just AA flights on specific routes  you can click “advanced search” from the AA.com homepage and click “American Airlines and American Eagle” under “What are your carrier preferences?”
• Travel is Free: The Tool to Get Hotel Award Alerts – Drew wrote up a great review of the Hotel Hustle tool, which allows you to set alerts for hotel availability.
• Air France/KLM Flying Blue miles are lesser known, but have a lot of value, especially their sweet spot ‘promo awards‘ and for use on Delta flights. Flying Blue is an Amex Membership Rewards and Citi ThankYou transfer partner, so you likely have access to these miles even if you were previously unaware of them.
• Million Mile Secrets: Starwood to Add ~290 Hotels! – Starwood just partnered with Design Hotels as their newest brand, which further expands the value of Starwood points.
• One Mile at a Time: The 4 Airlines With The Best Award Ticket Change Policies – As Ben admitted in the comments, it is somewhat silly that he left out Southwest Airlines, which unquestionably has the best change policy of all airlines ($0 in fees and you can change right up until 10 minutes prior to a flight), but this is still an interesting look at four other options.