FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Why are AA fares so expensive / non-competitive (2021+ consolidated)
Old Mar 9, 2025 | 11:16 am
  #171  
xliioper
FlyerTalk Evangelist
30 Countries Visited
2M
All eyes on you!
20 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: KARB
Programs: DL 2MM
Posts: 26,808
What is the route? What is the length of stay on your trips? Not much to go on here and looking at single route is not going to tell you much.

So, looking at your post history it looks like CLT-MCO. EF shows AA loaded a number of new roundtrip fares on this route on March 6th. The cheapest fares on route all require roundtrip bookings now with minimum stay requirements. For example, Tue/Wed fares with Saturday night stay start at $189 BE/ $249 Main roundtrip and require a 30 day advance purchase (there are additional roundtrip fare filings with 21, 14, and 7 day advance purchase requirements). You can also qualify for some of the roundtrip fares with Saturday returns. Anything stays shorter than that (depart Sun-Fri and return Sun-Fri without a Saturday night stay) do not qualify for roundtrip fare pricing and are basically $400+ each way as you will get one-way fares in each direction.

There are tricks to get around these one-way fares and qualify for the cheaper Saturday night stay fares (back-to-back ticketing) by nesting rountrip MCO-CLT bookings in CLT-MCO roundtrips. But AA could go after you as it's a violation of ticketing rules.

Last edited by xliioper; Mar 9, 2025 at 11:47 am
xliioper is offline