mmgm, excellent points about advantages of award travel!. Changing dates potentially saves you about $75/ticket if you assume you would have been traveling on some type of restricted fare. Unfortunately, the date change requires that free seats be available on the new dates. The stopover option, which I think is available in most US FF programs, may save $$ as well. I'm less sure about that though. I've actually had some purchased tickets with stopovers and the cost wasn't any more (probably because the flights connected in the city I was stopping over in). Open Jaw travel on award tickets (arrving at one airport and returning from another) is permitted in a number of programs and really saves $$ too. Open Jaw travel does present problems with rental cars though.