jbalmuth

Two interesting AA J mileage fares (J and J1NFFMN5) with no change/cancel penalties, unlimited transfers, and unlimited permitted stopovers (but no HIP exceptions), equivalently priced to every city in Argentina that I checked (Buenos Aires, Salta, Mendoza, Bariloche, even Ushuaia). The base roundtrip fare is ~$1,300, and routing/carriers used have a huge impact on the total fare actually paid. Every itinerary I priced added $800 in AA YQ.

I priced my final itinerary on ITA and used ITA powertools for purchasing (I used aa.com Germany, but Priceline was also a successful option for ticketing).

There were several oddities in ticketing alternative itineraries; for example, any routing that included MS metal to/from CAI (even if sold as OS or LH) caused both aa.com and Priceline to not find/load the itinerary, whereas OS or LH metal to/from CAI priced fine. ITA has very odd BA availability when the sales city field was left blank (i.e. defaulted to the departure city), often not finding the daily LHR nonstop, but this was fixed by changing the sales city (i.e. to London). Intra-Argentina flights were also hard to find if the Cabin field was set to Business (LATAM has no business cabins in that market), but this is overcome by setting the Cabin field to "Cheapest available", simultaneously inserting F BC=J in each of the Extension Code boxes for the other segments.

My itinerary, spread over a year, is to Bariloche, return from Mendoza, and has stopovers in London, New York, Buenos Aires and New York again and priced at Euro 2,250. (BA Tierpoints: 990). Flying via Rome, instead of London, didn't change the base fare but added several hundred dollars to the total; I investigated and found that somehow the computed AZ YQ was absurdly high (exceeding the combined BA YQ and U.K.APD by ~$200 or so). Flying back to CAI from NYC via ZRH would have added only a few euros more.

For AA Business Extra members, the J fare coding permits liberal use of BXP2 awards for upgrades to A class on the 777W (i.e. LHR - JFK, MIA - EZE, GRU - JFK etc.). At 1,300 points each, these are well priced (i.e. small number of points for small incremental onboard benefit).

N.B. There are also "I" fares from CAI to other cities in South America, but beside having change/cancel fees (albeit small), do not appear to allow for multiple stopovers in both the U.S. and Europe in both directions. YMMV