YMMV, but we were able to cut our flight costs in half in March on a trip to Bruges and Paris by booking only the 2 night minimum hotel stay that is required by AA Vacations in order to give you access to their held back discount air buckets. We flew into/out of BRU, used the hotel portion for our first and last nights in BRU, and did the rest ourselves. The hotel portion does not need to be in the arrival city and does not have to be for consecutive days.

We even considered just booking 2 nights at the cheapest fleabag hotel we could find and just not showing up, which we have done on bundels from Travelocity w/o a problem, i.e. they did not cxl our return air simply because we did not check in to the hotel. I would want to check the terms on that one before risking that on AA.

The only snag was that the AA Vacations apparently cannot apply a SWU, as the air booking is done by a different "division" of AA. There is a lag period between booking and ticketing by that division when the EXP desk cannot access the PNR. If you are planning on applying a SWU, you will have to wait for the status to change to "ticketed" before you can have the SWUs applied--not a long wait, but long enough in my case for one of the flights to go to C=0. EXP desk was able to fix, but be warned.