I found this "glitch" (?) myself about a year or two ago. I think I probably even posted it here on FT if you wanna go do a search for that thread. At the time, it didn't really seem like there was a ryhme or reason to how they decided what got charged 1/2 an RR award vs. what got charged a full RR award. You just had to enter in the origins and destinations and see what popped out. The things that I did stumble onto were that you could NOT stay anywhere more than 4 hours, if the connection wasn't under 4 hours, then you were charged a full RR award. I saw you mentioned above that you could stay up to 12 hrs, have you gotton any connections up to 12 hours to price out at only 1/2 an RR? I never could do it. Thus I figured that the only thing this would be good for is a courier (sp?) or somebosy like that who only needed to drop off stuff and then return. Or possibly a short layover in a third city to have lunch with a friend or something like that. I also figured you could probably extend the 4 hour connection rule to about 6 hours by using the "flat-tire" rule. But alas, I never found a time to take advantage of this "glitch".

Oh yeah, back when I was looking at it, if I remember correctly you couldn't go from the same airport and back to the same airport. I think I checked thru a bunch of scenarios and could only get something like BWI-MCO-PHL and other such itineraries to work. So if you don't have 2 SWA airports near you, then it really wouldn't work. And when I looked it was before you could use RR awards on ATA. It might make it easier to attempt this now that ATA will allow RR redemption to DCA/DFW/JFK (or LGA is it?)/etc.