Swiss, Adria, and Croatia Airlines award seats are now bookable on continental.com, meaning that 26/27 Star Alliance carriers can now be booked quickly and easily online. Only Ethiopian Airlines, which joined Star Alliance last December, is yet to be added.

Up until now, the use of the Air Canada/Aeroplan or ANA award search ...

People often ask me how they can squeeze the most value out of their frequent flyer miles. I begin my answer by stating that maximizing monetary value and actual value are two very different things and ultimately there is no magic formula that tells you whether you are effectively using your miles.

I find the biggest waste of miles is to use them to purchase consumer products, like spending 200K miles on a $700 television set when those miles could have been used for two business ...

The most frustrating part of booking an award trip is when a telephone call to the airline is required. Some agents are quicker than others, but generally telephone awards just take a long time to book. I type this as I wait (33 minutes and counting) to speak to an Air Canada Aeroplan reservations to book an award. Thankfully, I can multi-task...

Earlier tonight, however, I set a new personal record by booking three complex awards with United Airlines in under 15 minutes. The agent ...

For months, seat assignments have been a major annoyance on mixed Continental/United itineraries. A CO-operated UA codeshare booked on united.com required that you copy the reservation reference number and proceed to continental.com to assign seats. The same was true of United-operated flights booked through Continental.

And even when seats were assigned, they did not always match up between the two sites. For example, upgrades on the United segments of my mileage run to Kona and Sao ...

While this deal has been floating around the travel blogosphere all week, it is noteworthy enough to mention here.

Chase is offering 50,000 Continental bonus miles for signing up for their MasterCard OnePass credit card. Even better, the miles post after your first purchase--there is no minimum spending requirement. And there's no annual fee the first year.

And still better,  CO's Mile-a-thon offer is coming up. If you hold off for a bit and sign up under that ...

I still am rooting for this design, but at least the merger team at Continental/United is making some progress on the livery of the combined carrier.

When UA and CO announced they were getting hitched in May, they revealed this livery for the post-merger airline. I was horrified by it because it completely eliminated the UA-brand identity and the proposed "United Airlines" font appeared woefully outdated and unbecoming.

Yesterday, a new livery was ...