I'll start with who jolie and soxie are: they are my german shepherds. They are both females, but I am male.

In retired a couple of years ago; I have the time to travel. The wife, still wants to work, so most of my trips are solo.

I am very flexible on hotels--I need my own toilet and shower, so not so flexible that I would stay in a hostel. But other than that I will stay in very humble places.

When a flight is longer than about 3 hours, though, I won't go unless I am in business/first class. So, for overseas and down to South America, the cost of business class is the deciding factor. And traveling overseas in business class using ff miles is almost impossible. I managed to get over to Europe this past year using ff miles and I have another trip booked this year. But I booked both of those trips about nine months in advance. Frankfurt seems to be the easiest place to get business class tickets to Europe for 100,000 miles.

Asia and South America are high on my list of places to go, but I have yet to find award tickets for less than 240,000 miles--ridiculous. That is equal to about $9600--I value the miles at about $.04 based on my Frankfurt experience.

I am primarily hoping to find strategies for finding discounted business class airfare.