I’d like to welcome all the MillionMileSecrets readers and thank you for taking the time to check out our blog. The weekly interview series has been one of my favorite weekly reads on MillionMileSecrets, so I’m honored that Daraius was interested in featuring our blog this week. To celebrate, we have a $50 airline gift card giveaway which you can all enter! See the details on how to enter at the end of this post.
Enjoying business class on our Qantas flight from Singapore to Brisbane.
Since many of you are arriving here for the first time, we’ve put together a bit of information about the blog, along with links to some of our most popular posts. Click here to learn a bit more about us. We love to hear any comments you might have, or answer any questions. As mentioned in the interview, Anna-Lisa and I have been traveling around Southeast Asia and Australia for almost five months now, using miles for many of our flights and hotel points for staying in the more expensive cities (they are really coming into good use in Melbourne, our current location!).
Almost all the airports we’ve been through on our trip so far. Over the next couple months we will be adding a few cities throughout Europe as well.
Blog Goals and Some of Our Favorite Posts
Our blog has a few goals. I initially started the blog because I wanted to be able to show our friends how they too can enjoy traveling with miles. We have many posts on the basics of starting out collecting miles and points. Some of the most popular include:
Want to Fly for Free? Follow These 10 Simple Steps
The Art of Booking a Multi-Segment International Award Ticket
Our Trip Around the World – Halfway Update
Our Business Class Adventure: 12 Segments, 9 cities, 4 airlines, all for 130k AA miles and $270 each
Obviously, there are many blogs online that do this, so we thought it would be useful to write some posts about the places we visited and activities we enjoyed while we were there. I’m especially proud of our series on visiting Myanmar (Burma), as we really enjoyed our two weeks there and highly recommend that others go visit.
Our Series of Myanmar Travel Posts. We especially enjoyed our time in Bagan and Lake Inle!
A Fisherman on Inle Lake, one of our favorite places in Myanmar!
We are both vegetarians, so you’ll notice that we like to write about our experiences finding good food we can eat. We’ve also had a great time taking thousands of pictures throughout our adventures, so we periodically include posts mainly full of photos. Finally, I’m obsessed with AA Explorer Awards and am in the process of writing a series of posts regarding them. Look for those to be posted in the near future.
Our Favorite Chiang Mai Vegetarian Restaurants
$50 Gift Certificate Giveaway
To welcome everyone, we’ve happy to announce that we will award a $50 gift card to one lucky reader. Since we love traveling, the gift card will be for a US-based airline (United, American, Southwest) of the winner’s choosing. There are two ways to enter, and completing both will give you two entries. The options are described below:
1. Subscribe to the blog: Simply scroll up and enter your email in the “subscribe to blog” box on the top right to be added to our subscriber list. You’ll be entered in the contest, and get an email whenever we have a new blog post. Note that I will be emailing the email listed if you win, so make sure it’s an email you check regularly.
2. Like us on Facebook and share one of the posts on our Facebook page: choose one of the posts we’ve linked to on the AwardTravelWisdom page that you like and share it with your friends to get an entry. Only one entry can be earned, so no need to spam your friends.
The contest will run from now until midnight, Pacific time, Monday the 10th of March (thus you until end of day Monday to enter). I will choose the winner via a random number generator and contact the winner via email or Facebook to find out what airline they want their prize to be from. We will then announce the winner as soon as possible. Good luck to everyone participating!
We hope you enjoy the blog and please feel free to comment for any reason! We wish you all many happy travels of you own!
I was in Myanmar and Chiang Mai this past January 2014. Loved it. I , too, plan to travel around the world on AA in 3 years when I retire. Hopefully there won’t be much devaluation on the AA miles. Will be looking forwards to your posts on your adventure.
Hi Sil, thanks for the comment.
Good luck collecting a lot of AA miles. I hope they won’t be devalued, but imagine that they will be within the next three years, considering United, Southwest, and Delta all did recently. As long as they don’t get rid of the AA Explorer Awards when they finish the merger with USAir, I won’t be too annoyed.
You are both taking my dream trip around the world!
I subscribed to learn more about it after I read the bit about you in millionmilessecret blog.
Thanks for posting your adventure.
Glad you like it. This trip has been fantastic and I highly recommend organizing yourself to do a similar one if its your dream P Nguyen!
Great story of you around the world trip.
Thanks Abe!
I’m a subscriber and I shared your post on Fb (Mari Belle). Thanks for the giveaway.
Thanks Mari. Good luck on the giveaway!
Hey Aurelian and Anna-Lisa, just wanted to say thanks to both of you for sharing your travel experiences and tips. My boyfriend and I left the US last summer after finishing undergrad and traveled in Asia for a couple months before coming to Australia where we are now. We used award miles for some of our flights but we are pretty new to the game and definitely made some mistakes as far as not maximizing the points by using the right redemption strategies. I loved your posts on the Waterfall Gibbon Experience and Burma, we didn’t know much about those countries so we didn’t make an effort to go but its a must on our list now for the next time we go to SE Asia. We did visit Thailand though and the Elephant Nature Park was definitely our favorite experience! Although other travel blogs like TPG and MMS are helpful, its really exciting to get a fresh outlook on the whole travel award system and I’m looking forward to reading more from your blog!
Hi Cecilia,
Thanks for your comment! Wonderful that you got to travel as well, there are so many amazing places in this world. We did really enjoy Burma, try to go there before it gets too touristy! We are actually in Melbourne right now, we are loving it here, so many things to do! Where in Australia are you?
We’ve been living in Brisbane for a couple months doing temp work. Your right, there are so many amazing places in the world and once you start you just don’t want to stop exploring!
Thank you for the giveaway! I am a subscriber and shared this post on facebook as Bert Ruiz
Thanks Bert!
Best wishes on the start of your blog. Look forward to all you have to offer by way of information and experience! 🙂