Stop Over on an Award ticket.
 

I find the 'Miles (required) from' disclaimer a little confusing at times.
Assuming a round trip. Should the mileage required, assuming a stopover, be the same as no stopover ?
ie London to Anchorage, stopping over in Minneapolis. Is the LHR / MSP, MSP /ANC regarded as two separate mileage requirements, or do they only require the LHR /ANC mileage for the stopover ?
This may not be an ideal example, but looking to get to S America, the booking engine just got me totally confused with the total mileage required in J.
In fact , I found one example when it seemed to indicate that booking separate one ways would be a better bet.
Thanks for your opinions.

I was on the online chat yest with FB rep asking about stop overs on reward tix

Basically

Has to be a round trip
Have to be booked over the phone
They will charge a fee for that even when it cannot be booked online
They could not succinctly explain the routing rules, i.e. how far out of the way could one go to create a stop over. That might be determined by an algorithim that reps do not know/understand.
They could not explain if it was always valid for partner travel
Has to be availability of course on all legs
Can do an open jaw on the return, but there are other rules about zones there. (did not ask about US zones, if any)
Can not do stop over in origin country.
The rep suggested that the natural stopovers are in their hub cities, which makes sense. I left it at that, as that's probably good enough.

You cannot book stopover tickets online. You have to call.

As stated above, you can only have a stopover on a return booking; and only in one direction (either the outbound or the inbound; you cannot stopover on both). It should not increase the cost of the flight; however, it may very well do, depending on the availability on the sectors necessary to complete your travel. (Flying Blue proces are now "starting from" prices - so even a direct, non-stop routing between origin and destination without any stops may not be possible at the advertised price).

A stopover is a deliberate break in your journey of over 24 hours. Necessary stops of less than 24 hours to connect points that have no direct service are, of course, always allowed.

A stopover can only occur where it makes sense, i.e. Where it occurs at a logical break in your proposed journey. So a stopover in MSP on LHR - ANC would appear OK (though presumably this would require an Alaska Airlines segment which may cause problems) while a stopover in Bangkok on a London to New York ticket would clearly NOT be OK. The same logic as for selecting transfer points should apply here...which can be paraphrased as not going unnecessarily out of the way, or require the addition of several otherwise unnecessary segments in order to complete travel between all listed points (origin, stopover, destination).

Just pick up the phone and talk to a Flying Blue agent.

Thanks.
I was trying to use the ' multi destination' option on the Award booking tool, assuming I could use the first destination as my stopover but got completely frustrated......so I will call as suggested, but wanting to use a partner I guess I just need to try and be patient to get my requirements over. I suppose I could try the email route and just try to spell it out as clearly as I can, which may be a better option prior to 'Bonjour...'

I booked an open jaw including stopover earlier this year, the fee to book via the FB desk was waived as I could not book what I wanted online.

My stopover was less than 24 hrs, but the connection I wanted was not shown as available from origin to destination, though my research showed that the individual sectors were available. Using the 1 free stopover option I was therefore able to book the connection I wanted at no extra miles.

Hmm that's weird. So maybe using the stopover is a way of overriding married segment logic for their system?

Thanks for sharing that, that is quite interesting information.

Also that was nice of them to waive the phone booking fee. I've been on the online chat with reps twice in the last week or so asking questions, and they've never offered that up even when probed on it.

The return route was MEL-CAN-AMS on CZ, putting MEL-AMS in the system they only ever offered the daytime flight MEL-CAN which would have given a 5 or 6 hour transfer at CAN, using an award booking tool I saw that the overnight MEL-CAN was available giving an 18 hour transfer or so, time to get a hotel and get proper rest etc., and in the end the airline provided the hotel room free anyway! I did have to explain to the FB agent that this was all possible, she wasn't aware of the free stopover option, but went to check and 2 minutes later came back to confirm it all.

As for the waiver of the booking fee, maybe its just me, I had a paid NZ ticket also and again booked on the phone to get the connection I wanted and they waived their fee!

Of course. Married segments implies a connection; when you have a stopover, there is no connection (unless getting to/from your stopover requires more than one segment!)

That said, an 18-hour connection is not a stopover - but booking tools often "ignore"/actively avoid such long layovers, so merely getting the agent to manually assemble such an itinerary would give you options that the tool would never comtemplate. That's what seems to have happened here.

Just book a Open Jaw / Stop over award over the phone

Was not even mentioned so definitely no booking fee if you can't book it online

Indeed it's very confusing, as far as I understood (in my case I wanted to do USH-CDG with a stop over in EZE) the USH EZE booking class has to be "compatible" with the EZE CDG one. She told me the reason for that is because USH EZE is AR metal.