Originally Posted by
rrgg
...Losing international stopovers in the old-old rules was worse, which I regularly used...
Yeah, the was "the biggie" in my mind as well-- that was a huge step down in award value.
With this version though, people were adding N.American stop-overs onto awards that made zero sense in the context of the award itself-- and using AA metal there were almost no published-fare restrictions on same (unlike on partner awards)-- so AA really was providing free vacations (well, 1/2 of one) to some members in addition to the value that members who used the stopovers in the way you describe got from the stopover.
Would have been nice if they could have reigned in the nonsensical stopovers (NOT that I'm saying there's ANYTHING wrong with people availing themselves fully of same while they existed) and kept the ability to have an "en route" stopover-- where a logical transit point is simply turned into stopover-- meaning no extra flight segments were being flown by the member.
But, alas, elimination instead.