All hail: restaurant week is upon us

By April, every Expedia customer will have the chance to enroll in Expedia Rewards, a re-launch of the online travel agency's loyalty program. But current customers can join the beta test, as Gary Leff was first to report. Why wait? Existing customers can go to the Expedia Rewards page and sign in using the "Join Expedia Rewards Beta" link in the center left hand column of the page. During the beta period, you can earn points that will still count once the program becomes official. Expedia's revamped rewards program is now the easiest to use of the major online travel sites. As before, users will earn a point for every dollar spent on hotel stays, redeemable with no blackout or expiration dates. But following the upgrade, travelers may buy vouchers good for partial payment of a hotel stay and earn points when booking airfare, which oddly, they couldn't do before. You earn one Expedia point per dollar spent. "Any time there's a change in the program people think it will be for the worse," says says Edward Nevraumont, Senior Director Loyalty Marketing Expedia. "This is a rare time where a company has made things better." You can use your points to stay at 90 percent of hotels sold on Expedia or toward any airfare sold on Expedia. No blackout dates for redemption. Points won't expire for 18 months, and you can keep the points active if you have some spending via your Expedia account. Another positive change is that if you use a lot of your points with hotels, Expedia will give you a better ratio of rewards to points. If you save up your points, you'll usually get greater redemption value for the points—bringing the program into line with the most popular loyalty programs out there. Coming soon is a little "slider" icon, which will allow you to see how many points you can get for a redemption. Budget Travel checked in with Randy Petersen, the ultimate guru of loyalty programs and founder of InsideFlyer and FlyerTalk, to ask his view: "What we do know is that the hotel experience and reward has certainly become more important than even the mighty frequent flyer mile when it comes to the travel experience because after all most hotel guests aren't subject yet to paying a fee for checking in." What do you think? MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Loyalty programs with the best payoff! Air miles hard to earn? Not with new card bonuses Why you won't find American's fares on Expedia or Orbitz

This month, Steve Kamb began flying a 35,000-mile trip around the world, visiting 15 cities as different as Dublin and Bangkok, for only $418 in plane tickets. His budget travel secret? Starting in the fall of 2009, Kamb began to rack up frequent flier miles by taking advantage of credit card bonus offers and other tricks. You could copy Kamb by taking advantage of the current snowballing of point bonuses for airline-affiliated credit cards. Who knows? A year from now, you might have earned enough points to take "free" international trips, too. As Kamb recently told Gizmodo, his itinerary would have cost about $6,000, had he paid for tickets in cash. He instead spent half-a-year acquiring "tons" of miles by applying for credit cards. He used the cards for, he says, about $2,000 in purchases over half-a-year. He says he paid the cards off in full each month, and received enough miles for his purchases to qualify for promotional bonus mile awards. Want to earn big bonuses on your purchases? Sign up for a new airline mileage credit card and you'll receive a generous signing bonus. The following bonuses are rare opportunities, offering three times as many awards as were available just a year ago. Now through February 28, American Airlines and Citibank give you 75,000 miles and waive your first annual fee if you take out their platinum card—if you charge at least $4,000 in the first six months. As of this moment, the deal is no longer available by applying online, but still available if you call Citi at 888/766-2484. British Airways, Chase, and Visa allow select customer to earn 25,000 miles for getting a new card and another 25,000 for spending $2,500 within 90 days. You'll also pay no foreign transaction fees with this card, and a $75 annual fee. Continental will put 50,000 miles with your first purchase, and charge no fee during the first year, on its Chase card. Miles will still be good once Continental's merger with United winds up. Tips for first-timers: You will have to pay taxes and fees on your "free" flight. Miles earned without flying won't count to status upgrades. But the miles earned on one airline can be redeemable for travel on partner airlines. Have a spouse? Consider each applying for a card, to double your mile totals. Credit card advice: Fees can be high, so after you've gotten your free flight(s), rethink whether you want to keep the accounts. It's also not recommended to apply for new credit cards in the same year that you're applying for a mortgage or other major loan because your credit score may be temporarily lowered because of the application. The fine print: Know that banks don't accept every application, and you may not be able to take advantage of the offers mentioned here because of how you've used cards in the past or your current credit record. For inspiration, you can follow Steve Kamb travel via his blog, of course. FREQUENT FLIER RESOURCES The Frugal Travel Guy is a free site that Kamb says gave him invaluable strategies. To find the best deals for racking up miles, Gary Leff of View from the Wing recommends using reward search engine evreward.com. Gary's site is itself a great source if info on promotions. If you're juggling multiple reward cards, awardwallet.com is a free site that helps you keep track of them. The cards only work if you use them to spend money and earn points. You can enter a sample monthly budget into the free Mile Cards Calculator to see which card may be most rewarding for you. Once you've earned your miles, use Yapta's award-seat tracker to be alerted when a reward seat opens up on flights you've selected. Fee-based services offer alerts and tools for frequent fliers, too. Excellent ones include travelhacking.org and insideflyer.com. MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Southwest waters down its Rapid Rewards program (15 comments) United, Continental and your frequent flier miles Do you turn your cell phone off on planes?