Those who hold a Chase Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card know the value of these precious rewards points. The flexibility to transfer the points to partner hotel and airline loyalty programs allows you to book free hotel nights and airline award tickets. However, you can also redeem points to book travel directly on the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal. There are several travel redemption options available including booking hotels, cruises, rental cars, and activities, however, one redemption you should consider for your Chase Ultimate Rewards points (UR points) is to book your flights on the Chase travel portal. Here’s why.

If you’re not already using Air France and KLM’s Flying Blue rewards program, you should start thinking about getting familiar with it. Flying Blue is a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points and Starwood Preferred Guest points and offers some incredible sweet spots. Let’s take a look at some of Flying Blue’s best sweet spots.

Asiana Airlines, a Korean carrier, is a diamond in the rough in the points and miles game. It’s a lesser known program that is not often discussed in the travel blogosphere. However, Asiana has an excellent award chart that offers significantly lower award prices for Star Alliance partner flights than most airlines in this alliance. This is especially true relative to United Airlines, the Star Alliance member with whom US travelers have the most familiarity, in large part due to the transferability of Chase Ultimate Rewards to United. In this post, we will discuss how to earn Asiana miles, sweet spots in the award charts, and some tips for booking award tickets.

Travel hackers have more choices than ever when it comes to which points or miles currency to use when making an award booking. In many cases, the most obvious choice isn’t always the most economical.

For example, if you wanted to book a flight within the U.S., you first choice may be to use the miles of a domestic airline. However, it may be possible to pay a lower number of miles by booking that same flight via the award chart of an international partner. In all cases, you will want to compare the value of mileage redemption to the redemption rates available for fixed value currencies.

Being able to cash in your miles and points for an award flight is a great feeling. Even better? Getting an incredible deal. The key to redeeming fewer miles is to take advantage of sweet spots found on award charts to book flights for great prices compared to what else is out there.

One of the highlights of the year so far in the points and miles world was a recent revelation with Korean Air. Even though they’re late to the party, you can now book certain SkyTeam partners online, a much-needed improvement over the previous system.

Alaska Airlines is a favorite airline among travel enthusiasts for a variety of reasons. They have a well-regarded product with much more competent and friendly customer service than most legacy airlines.  Although Alaska is not part of any of the three major airline alliances, they do have a diverse network of partners, resulting in a unique award program. And they are merging with Virgin America this year which will broaden the possibilities.

The combination of a good airline with good partners results in an array of award charts that offer great value on everything from short-haul domestic economy tickets all the way to international premium cabin awards.

Amtrak Guest Rewards is a solid frequent traveler program offering members decent redemption rates, particularly for last-minute bookings and peak travel. Program members can earn points through train travel or with one of Amtrak’s co-branded credit cards. Amtrak also has a few hotel transfer partners, including Hilton HHonors and Starwood Preferred Guest.

You’ve been painstakingly saving those miles for a special trip and you finally reached your goal. You’ve got enough miles to book that award flight you’ve had your eye on. Booking award travel can be a bit intimidating if you haven’t done it before—especially when booking over the phone. But, have no fear. It’s easy to master the art of booking award tickets. Just use our handy script if this is your first time trying to book a free flight from your frequent flyer program.

The American Express Membership Rewards program offers members the ability to redeem points for all kinds of rewards. Like similar credit card rewards programs such as Chase Ultimate Rewards and Citi ThankYou, the best Membership Rewards value usually comes from transferring points to an airline partner. However, there are some exceptions that are worth considering like booking tickets through the Amex travel portal. Here’s a rundown of when that makes sense and when it doesn’t.

When United recently overhauled its award ticket rules this past summer many saw it as a massive devaluation. United had relatively friendly award routing rules that allowed one stopover and two open jaws on roundtrip award tickets.Those rules are gone now though and have been replaced by the “Excursionist Perk,” which is essentially a free segment on an international itinerary. It comes with new rules. We bring you workarounds. Read on.

Crystalline azure waters, near-constant sunshine, and overwater bungalows are the images conjured up when one thinks of their dream vacation to French Polynesia. Most people know of Tahiti, which is the largest island in French Polynesia, but there are many others with stunning resort properties like Bora Bora and Moorea.

It is essential to get the Allegiant World MasterCard in order to participate in the carrier’s frequent flyer program, myAllegiant. You cannot earn or redeem points without it. The card is similar to a cash back cards, allowing you to redeem points for credit toward Allegiant Air purchases. Points are fixed at a value of one cent each.

The dust has settled from United Airlines’ new award booking rules which went into effect on October 6. While the news was worse than originally thought, there are some tricks that allow for creative award routings. In United’s zeal to create a mechanical computer-dependent system, it seems they did not program in enough rules to prevent travelers from hopping around the globe with complex itineraries that provide tons of value for MileagePlus members.

Anytime an airline announces changes to their award program, the changes are usually worse than the airline tries to make them sound. In August, United announced major changes to award booking rules as well as to their online booking engine. These changes became effective last week on October 6 and now that we have had some time to test out the new booking engine, we can confirm the devaluation is worse than expected and that United’s original announcement was a bit deceptive.

Chase Ultimate Rewards is a great program with many fans. Just like the American Express Membership Rewards and Citi ThankYou programs, Ultimate Rewards offer multiple ways to redeem points. It is the only program that allows easy cash redemption at 100:1, but it mostly shines on travel redemptions.

If you like to travel, you might want to avoid some common mistakes in order to stretch your dollars. These mistakes are easy to make because the Ultimate Rewards earning structure is a bit complicated.

It can be frustrating to redeem award miles for an overseas trip. But, keep in mind that not all hope is lost since many airline websites fail to show award space from all of their partners. This means that there are many routes with open seats available for award tickets going empty, but you may have to call the airline mileage program to find them.

When we are talking about air travel, positioning can mean one of two things.

In the aviation industry, a positioning flight occurs when an airline needs to send a plane to another place for conducting a flight. It can be a passenger or cargo plane that ended one flight in one airport, but must start another commercial flight in a different airport. In the past, these flight used to be conducted without passengers, but that has changed. There is a whole underground science of spotting these flights because many people believe airlines sell discounted tickets for them. But for award flights, it’s different.

Cuba is all the rage now. Since the U.S. Department of State announced a new course in relations with Cuba in December 2014, we’ve come a long way in getting people there. Traveling restrictions have been considerably relaxed – actually, traveling to Cuba has never been illegal, but spending money on the island was, and it’s hard to do one without the other. Technically speaking, it’s not like anyone can fly to Cuba just as you fly to any other place in the world, as you must cite one of 12 reasons so the airline could sell you the ticket.

In the last three years, all the major U.S. airline frequent flyer programs have had devaluations. Delta has gone further than everyone else though, by removing its SkyMiles award charts early last year. The goal was probably to stop complaints about program’s frequent devaluations because if you don’t have a chart you may not know that the award levels have increased. But what they are doing now has completely changed devaluations as we know them. Read on to see what we have uncovered about upcoming changes and when they take effect.