mattyjdallas

Foolishly let my status lapse a couple years ago, but I'm on the cusp of getting gold again on American.

Live in Dallas and looking for assistance in planning a MR by the end of year where I can maximize segments from DFW on weekends.

I'm new to MRs, so any strategic advice would be most appreciated.

Michael El

Being in a hub gives you many advantages as you can do short segments to achieve your goal.

I'd look at highly competitive markets, tourist places, and consider going out and back in the same day. Watch for AA promos to certain city pairs. Look at flights that go DFW to hub to hub and back to DFW. Remember you can also fly US Airways.

I always use Kayak.com to find MR deals. Other FTers may have additional ideas.

JohnAx

The idea seems to be to find two points that have low-priced competition (likely nonstop by a dominant carrier) that USdbaAA serves via a cnx at an intermediate point, each leg as short as possible. Then take a look at MPM for the route and see if you can practically route via a second cnx.

A couple of years ago when segment runs were allowed in the MR forum, there were some quite ingenious routings posted, all ancient history now of course, and no doubt the result of lots of effort by the posters. Maybe searching "segment" in the MR forum back 2 or 3 years will give you some inspiration.

FWIW it seemed that the best segment runs ended up costing very nearly the same as the best mileage runs back then, i.e about 4 cents a mile, but in those days there were lots of DEQM deals on offer. All different now, including the nit that status and miles are more nearly worthless than they used to be (and the depreciation in value will continue.)

Subject to wiser opinion, I don't see why AS couldn't be used as well.

drewp123

Go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas/...d_destinations

and write down every destination served by AA, US and American Eagle.

Then, go to:

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

and enter dfw as your origin, and paste in all those destinations. Then you can sort by price, # of stops etc., and hopefully find something that works for you

jbeckett

YUM via PHX is 4 segments for $198, for example day trip on 10/11.

JohnAx

If you un-click the non-stop box, the aa trip planner will only show city pairs with at least one stop. Unfortunately the destination resets to the beginning of the list each time so you have to drag down to the city where you left off.

janetdoe

Disagree. For segment running, the cheapest routes are AAA-DFW-BBB-DFW-AAA. DFW-XXX is pretty much a losing proposition unless AA happens to be responding to a WN or F9 sale.

Enter both your origin and your destination as DFW + airports within 500 miles and then for the advanced routing language, put "DFW" to force a single connection through DFW. You should be able to string together a series of tickets on a Saturday:
DFW-AAA (Ticket 1)
AAA-DFW-BBB (Ticket 2)
BBB-DFW-AAA (Ticket 2)
AAA-DFW (Ticket 1)

or in some cases:
DFW-AAA
AAA-DFW-BBB
BBB-DFW-CCC
CCC-DFW-AAA
AAA-DFW

You may be able to book as one-ways for the same price as round trips, sometimes it's more flexible for irrops if you do that.