Hello friendly FT community.

I'm flying back east to New York from San Francisco for a five year college reunion (for the first time in my life, I'm starting to feel old) Thursday, 5/24 and returning Sunday 5/27.

I want to get as many AA miles out of this as possible by having as many stopovers as I can on both the way out and the way back, while keeping it cheap (<$300). How do you guys research this stuff? I assume there are certain stopovers that add less to the ticket than others, but don't know how to find them.

Is this info available on some sort of chart or public database, or on FT? I've done some searches on FT, but it seems like I need a rosetta stone to make any sense of the results.

Should I expect to use trial and error on AA.com? Is booking through the website the preferred method, or should I call an agent? How helpful are agents with this kind of stuff anyway? Is it shunned?

Any help with this is greatly appreciated, including help with my specific case. Flame me if you must, but note that I am currently looking through old posts to try to figure this stuff out.

As a slightly older newbie I can give you some advice here. You can usually add two or three connections, but in order to keep fares reasonably cheap you pretty much need to stick with hubs - you can't just pick cities at random to add to your route.

The best tool that I've found for searching for this type of thing is ITA software - http://matrix.itasoftware.com. It's a pretty powerful tool, and I really don't understand most of of it's advanced features, but briefly to do what you want, you would enter your dates and put NYC:: AA AA AA in the from box, and SFO:: AA AA AA in the to box. That tells it that you want to go from NYC to SFO and you want three segments on AA on the way out and three segments on AA on the way back. I ran a quick search using those options with your dates and I found several flights that priced out at about $364. I added a fourth segment (NYC:: AA AA AA AA and SFO:: AA AA AA AA) and that brought the price up to $440, but you can play around trying different dates or whatever.

Unfortunately, you can't book flights on the ITA software page, so booking whatever you find can sometimes be a challenge... especially for complicated routing with a lot of segments. People say that orbitz is usually a pretty good bet because apparently it uses the same software that ITA does, and I've had luck calling US Air to make reservations... I assume it would work as well for AA.

Good luck... and let us know how it goes:)

Brett

Welcome aboard! We are all a bit nuts here, but harmless.

In case you haven't found it yet, take a look at the "sticky" thread at the top of this forum titled "Welcome to the Mileage Run Forum," authored by our esteemed moderator bhatnasx. It contains a lot of useful information, but most specifically it has links to a lot of what you want (and need.) Read the whole thread. After you have read it, go back and find the section on "How Do I Find and Book a Mileage Run." In the first paragraph, you will find links to "Mileage Run Tools Thread" and "VPescado's Guide on How to Construct and Book a Mileage Run." Those are the basic books of our bible. After you have read them, look through the rest of the sticky for lots of other info. That should all give you a pretty good start.

JR

Would echo Brett...ITA is a really great tool for suggesting bizarre routings. Some of us old timers have put in hours piecing it all together manually, back in the day, before ITA. Some connecting cities are allowed, some aren't, and just finding out can be a challenge (see the stickies).

In general, adding unnecessary segments to pump up miles will trip some additional taxes like more segment taxes and PFCs, though in most cases you max those out anyway. If you run afoul of the rules that are sometimes hard to dig up it'll greatly affect the fare, so it's usually not hard to see if it's working out or not. The great thing about ITA is that it checks tons of combos and only suggests the ones it has found to work, all priced out and everything.

ITA can't book and ticket, though, so you'd have to take those suggestions over to the airline site or a third party and plonk them in.

I shudder to think what figure you'd get if you divided the dollars saved (or "earned" in miles) by the number of computer jockeying hours it takes to do it, even in this tool-filled age. I've probably been working for $3 an hour or so for all this time.

Thank you both for your help. I've read the sticky and found it very useful. I hope to book this trip soon!

Thank you! exactly what I was looking for a couple of days ago..

The best tool that I've found for searching for this type of thing is ITA software - http://matrix.itasoftware.com. It's a pretty powerful tool, and I really don't understand most of of it's advanced features, but briefly to do what you want, you would enter your dates and put NYC:: AA AA AA in the from box, and SFO:: AA AA AA in the to box. That tells it that you want to go from NYC to SFO and you want three segments on AA on the way out and three segments on AA on the way back. I ran a quick search using those options with your dates and I found several flights that priced out at about $364. I added a fourth segment (NYC:: AA AA AA AA and SFO:: AA AA AA AA) and that brought the price up to $440, but you can play around trying different dates or whatever.

Hello FT MRs!


I am trying to get some extra AA miles out of my upcomming business trip to DEN.

I tried to follow VPescado's excellent guide "How to Construct and Book a Mileage Run" but I am running into a problem: I cannot find the routing rules of the fare that I'd like to book. I looked at Travelocity and Expedia and I just cannot see any routing rules mentioned. I don't want to post the fare rules here since the text is quite lengthy but maybe someone who knows about AA's fare rules can point me to the correct spot in the text....

A sample itinerary with the fare in question would be
6/11/07 BOS-ORD AA611 6PM - 7:40 PM
ORD-DEN AA867 8:45PM-10:15PM
Returning June 13:

1:35pm Depart - Denver, CO (DEN) American Airlines 446
4:30pm Arrive - Dallas/Ft Worth, TX (DFW)
7:25pm Depart - Dallas/Ft Worth, TX (DFW) American Airlines 430
Thu, Jun 14
12:05am Arrive - Boston, MA (BOS)


Thank you very much for your time and help.

M1


The beginning of the fare rules:

From: Boston, MA (BOS-All Airports)
To: Denver, CO (DEN-All Airports)
(and return)
Fare Basis Code: NR7XC30N

V FARE BASIS BK FARE TRAVEL-TICKET AP MINMAX RTG
1 NR7XC30N N R 198.00 ---- 7/1 -/ - 2
PASSENGER TYPE-ADT AUTO PRICE-YES
FROM-BOS TO-DEN CXR-AA TVL-11JUN07 RULE-2435 DFR/11
FARE BASIS-NR7XC30N SPECIAL FARE DIS-N VENDOR-ATP
FARE TYPE-XPN RT-INSTANT PURCHASE NONREFUNDABLE-TYPE FARES
USD 184.19 0002 E30MAR07 D-INFINITY FC-NR7XC30N FN-
SYSTEM DATES - CREATED 30MAR07/1218 EXPIRES INFINITY
....................

The full fare rules are at this address:

http://minim00.tripod.com/nr7q30n.htm

M1

Instead of posting routing rules, I recommend you read this thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=666185) (post #5).

Instead of posting routing rules, I recommend you read this thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=666185) (post #5).

Thank you very much for digging out this thread. Indeed expedia.ca shows the routing rules.