Originally Posted by
skylane
Those 'L' fares will earn you 1/2 of a point per mile flown. So your roundtrip will earn you 4000 points and 8000 miles (only the points counting towards the challenge). The secret to the AA challenge, when booking cheap fares, is to pad in short flights since there is a minimum of 500 points per flight.
L fares will actually earn 1 point/mile. I'm not sure the secret is actually lots of short flights...long-haul travel at 1 point/mile makes it pretty easy to do a challenge.