Starwood Preferred Guest or SPG for short is the Loyalty Program offered by the Starwood group of hotels. It is consistently voted as the Best Loyalty program in the market by business travelers.
It is also my personal favorite. Here are 10 reasons why:

Starwood hotels have a very extensive network of hotels all over the world. More importantly, they have hotels in a broad spectrum of price points. Their hotels include well known names like – Sheraton, Westin, W (no connection to a well known ex-president) and the hip aloft.
Very aggressive …

Airline Lounges are an oasis of luxury and comfort in crowded, noisy airports. While many people may disagree with my claim of ‘luxury’ in an airline lounge, no one can deny that in todays environment of flight delays and the need to be at airports early, lounges are a welcome respite. Most decent sized airports have airline lounges. Here is how they work – airlines make lounges available primarily for their elite customers or for upper calls passengers. US based airlines give this lounge privilege to both its elite and …

In Part 1 of this article I went over the different types of Credit Cards available that earn Airline Miles.
In this post I will provide you with 10 simple questions you need to ask your self that will help you pick the right credit card for you and maximize your airline miles rewards.
The most important question you want to ask your self is what is your goal for getting the card – is it just to get the maximum airline miles for every dollar spent or do you have a …

This article (in two parts) is going to help you travel thru the maze of choices of Airline Miles Credit Cards and help you pick the right card for you. Part one here is a survey of the landscape of the cards available. Part two will contain a series of questions and a flowchart to help you pick the right card.
Search on Airline Miles Credit Cards on Google and you will get pages and pages of all kinds of cards out there. Some of the offers seem absolutely unbelievable – …

You may not know the balance of your checking account, but you know your airline frequent miles account balance – both RDM and EQM!
You refer to cities by their airport codes rather than their regular names. ‘My parents live in CMH, but we are originally from MSY…’
Your family is surprised to hear that other peoples families actually have to pay for the tickets to their vacations
You catch any mistakes in the pre-flight safety announcement made by the Flight Attendant
You know which airline flies out of which gate at your home …

I have a simple rule with credit cards – I want something in return from the card vendor, every time I use the card (other than the credit, that is). As an Un-RoadWarrior, my 1st choice is always Airline Miles. My all time favorite cards for earning miles are the American Express cards. Here I will review three programs available with American Express cards that I have used to earn Airline miles. They are:

American Express Membership Rewards
Starwood Preferred Guest American Express Card
HiltonHonors American Express Cards

The main advantage of earning miles …

Here is a ‘Top 10 List’ of my favorite Frequent Flier related Websites. Add them to your bookmark list…

www.FlyerTalk.com: The ultimate forum on all things travel. Has dedicated forums for all Airline Frequent Flier & Hotel programs there are
www.sidestep.com: Excellent site to search for flights. It searches all other travel sites such as Orbitz, Expedia and airline sites for you
ITA Software: Extremely feature reach flight and routing search engine. Great tool for complex routing. For example, if you want to from DC to LA and want to go via Cleveland, …

As an amateur when it came to focussing on accumulating miles (what I am calling an un-roadwarrior), I ended up with miles accumulated on multiple airline programs. Some of these airlines do not fly on routes I want to redeem these miles on. So, the question, can I sell or trade these miles for miles on airline that I can fly?
Let me first address the question – how do you sell, buy or trade miles with someone else? Selling here is defined as you selling the award ticket or upgrade you …