Does your best friend jaunt off to seemingly exorbitant destinations with no visible means of funding? Has your boss been going on about Ultimate Rewards® and how they’ve landed him a suite at the Park Hyatt Paris? Whatever the case, you’ve heard about award travel and you’re interested. You may be new to award travel, but we're here to help get you started.

We'll break this down, step by step, so you can figure out how to plan your award travel.

1. Pick your destination

The first thing you’ll want to do when planning award travel is pick your destination. This may seem obvious, but there's a lot more to it when you’re planning on using rewards points. This is because you’ll find a huge variation in costs depending on where you’re going.

For instance, you can get a one-way, business class flight to Tahiti using American Airlines miles. This flight will cost you as little as 80,000 AAdvantage miles when departing from anywhere within the contiguous U.S. However, you can also choose to fly to Europe in business class — from anywhere within the contiguous U.S. — and it’ll cost you just 57,500 AAdvantage miles.

So, where you want to go makes a big difference. You’ll also want to consider your dates of travel. Peak travel dates will often cost you more rewards points, just as they would with cash tickets. Traveling during the offseason can help you save points and still get you where you want to go.