Originally Posted by efamous
When I asked AA how long a NY connection could be (LHR-JFK-GIG), they told me that they count anything over 23 hours 59 minutes as a stopover, which incurs an extra charge depending on the fare. I'd advise you to call the airline to doublecheck, but I'm sure you could persuade them that one minute (21:30 landing one day and 21:30 takeoff the next=24 hours unfortunately) between friends isn't a big deal. Then again, it might be a computer thing which a nice agent would have to manually override. I'd be curious to get their answer.
I've no experience of how AA deals with this but if they treat it as "black and white" (i.e., 23.59 or, for that matter 24.00 hours and not a minute more) then they're inconsistent with how they treat domestic 'sticker' upgrades. Those domestic 'stickers' are good for 500 miles but AA gives you 50 miles leeway.... so for example TPA-LGA is 1,012 miles but only requires 2 500-mile stickers to upgrade, i.e., anything up to 1,050 miles only requires 2 stickers.... 1,051 requires 3. Admittedly, stickers only come in 500-mile chunks whereas hours come in minute increments (at least as far as schedules are concerned) so the analogy isn't perfect. Ultimately, there has to be a "black and white line" somewhere but to insist that it's at 23.59 seems harsh (and perhaps simply wrong, depending on which wording you're reading). However, if the wording is ".. depart within 24 hours ..." then 'within' would imply 23.59.....