Originally Posted by
skywalker22
guv: thank you for the good info; you are clearly more experienced than I am. The way you describe it sounds good; I just have not come across those offers yet. When I fly, it is often at short notice, less than one month ahead of travel date. Are the offers you describe more likely to occur with long term planning? Again, my goal is to learn more so I can afford more travel. How do I get a multiweek stopover? I actually just wanted to plan the following trip:
LAX-BOS (1-WAY) WITH 3-DAY STOP - THEN: BOS-FLR (10-DAY STOP); FLR-MUC (6-DAY STOP) AND BACK: MUC-LAX. While I can fly AA for pay on this route, it is not available for miles, and for pay it costs $3500. Any suggestions?
I'm not sure if any of AA's partners flies into FLR; but both BA and IB fly into PSA, which is about an hour away from Florence.
AA's regular, all-partner awards only permit a stopover at a North American gateway; no stopovers are permitted elsewhere. So you could conceivably do a one-way LAX-BOS-PSA (via LHR or MAD), stopping over in BOS; then a one-way intra-Europe award PSA-MUC (probably via LHR or MAD, again); and then MUC-LAX via some connecting point. (If you fly from Europe nonstop to LAX on the award, you could treat LAX as your gateway stopover, and then continue on from there weeks or months later to another North American destination.) You can search oneworld schedules at this site:
http://www.travelsked.com/itdpda/html.asp?custcode=ONW
As an alternative, you could look into using a distance-based oneworld award, which permits stopovers at all connecting points, but requires that you use at least two oneworld partners other than AA (BA and IB would qualify). But, depending on the class of service and routing, the oneworld award might cost more miles than three one-way awards. You will need to price it each way, assuming that you can find award seats. There is an excellent sticky in the AA forum explaining the rules and award levels for oneworld awards.