stephem

So I hit the cancel button because I dont have time to argue or really want to push this. As you might guess, the refund to original form of payment option is there and well, if you have been paying attention to the fare construction you can guess what that credit would wind up being ;-)

TalkingPoint

You are all doing more creative routings than I. I don't travel much in the Americas, but after flights back from Europe/Asia/Oceania I always put a stopover in LAX and add an alaska segment on the end of my partner award to use later as a positioning flight.

eponymous_coward

Done that too (done LAS-SEA and SEA-PHX as extra segments before/after a CX award).

stephem

They have definitely improved their processes here, in addition to not letting me make changes on the final segment of a three segment alaska itinerary with a valid stopover, they now have cleaned up the refund process and regardless of whether you pick "refund" or "save ticket for later" you get nothing now ;-) But the good news is they really have not cleaned up the booking system and so you can still get lots of these "boomerangs" to work. I guess my plan is to have the "final" segment actually be two segments, such that there is the greatest likelihood of schedule changes that break that connection after the stopover. That seems to be the one place where they allow changes to the final segment(s), schedule changes that make illegal connections.