Originally Posted by swag

I found something today.

While the hotel-for-part-of-stay option is gone, there is an alternative for folks looking to bypass advance purchase restrictions for longer duration trips.

First the recap:
If the flights you want have inventory in cheaper fare buckets, but those fares are unavailable because the 7/14/21 day advance purchase date has passed, you can still get those fares by booking a flight+hotel package at Expedia or Travelocity. For example, on one route I fly, on short notice, RT airfare runs around $1000, while air+2 nights hotel totals around $600. That's right, adding the hotel saves $400. If you don't want the hotel, there's no need to actually check in.

For shorter trips, this works great. For longer trips, the cost of the hotel starts to eat away at the savings. Expedia used to have an option to buy a hotel for only part of the trip, so you could book a single night no matter how long your air trip was, but this was removed, as the OP discovered.

Now, here's what I found today.

Expedia now has an option for a 2-destination trip. The design is that you fly A-B-C-A, and get hotels in both B and C. But you can make this work to your advantage on a single destination trip. You can specify both B and C to be your real destination (A-B-B-A). Then, hit the button that says no airfare, you will make your own way from B-B. The key is that when you do this, you can now specify the date range for your hotels in each destination, and they need not cover the whole trip. The only requirement is that you have at least 1 night in each city. So you now have to but 2 hotel nights instead of 1, but that's still cheaper than a hotel for the whole trip. You can even select each of the 2 hotels to be the same hotel, if that's the cheapest.

While the FF treatment of these packages may vary by proivider, I have found both airlines I have used (AA, DL) did award miles. None of the 3 hotel chains (SPG, Marriott, Best Western) awarded points.

Mod, feel free to move to TravelBuzz or Online booking if appropriate.