Originally Posted by
rrgg
I only used the N.A. stopover once, but it was not my preference and necessary to get an award. Losing international stopovers in the old-old rules was worse, which I regularly used. At the time it sort of made sense to lose it since we had Explorer!
Sure, but weren't those free stopovers only on roundtrip award tickets?
I wouldn't be surprised if this is AA's way to signal to UA and DL that they too can go ahead and get rid of free stopovers completely in a move to a new US industry standard. UA doesn't have free stopovers on one-way awards. DL isn't yet offering one-way awards, but has free stopovers on at least some roundtrip/multicity awards. I doubt that DL would offer free gateway stopovers on one-way award tickets when they get around to one-way award tickets for no more than half the miles of the cheapest roundtrip mileage ticket.
I used the NA stopover on one-way awards way more than the stopover on the old roundtrip AA awards, but that was often -- and increasingly so -- because there was no same-day or next-day mileSAAver space on AA or otherwise on non-BA flights.