Challenge Questions
 

I looked through the website about AA/Challenges but didn't see anything regarding this. Forgive my ignorance on AA - never done this before.

I had a simple back and forth ORD-TOL-ORD in November on AA and didn't think anything of it. A couple weeks later, did that again. And again. I don't have enough points to make the Gold challenge threshold right now, but I believe that by the end of the second week of January I will.

Couple questions:

--> Can a challenge start/end date cross a calendar year boundary?
--> If yes and I call AAdvantage, will they retroactively start a challenge or would I be at square one when I called?

when i started my challenge by calling on the 25th, they moved it back to the 15th, because my flight was on the 26th of the month.

i don't know about the calendar year thing..

You won't find info on AA.com regarding the challenge. The only time I did the challege, they did not include the miles for the trip I took the week before. They happily began the challege the day of my inquiry.

Did you check AA.com, or the FT sticky? It's not on AA.com, and all your answers are found in the sticky in this very AA forum.

-Yes.
-No, you won't get your previously-posted flights to count. Sorry. The "retroactive" part of it is that challenges only start on the 1st and 16th of a given month, so if you start the 14th, they'll "start" the challenge on the 1st (but again, won't count previously-posted flights).

Thanks. This answers my questions!

I looked through http://aa.fewmiles.net which was linked in the sticky at the top. I didn't read the 51 pages of posts though.

FYI - FewMiles's site is out of date.

The commonly accepted advice is, read all 51 pages. I did. All those who did now know quite a bit about not just the challenges, but all things AA. Those who didn't... well, end up asking questions where the answers are "read the sticky" so you might as well save yourself the trouble.

(Actually, you probably can stop around page 30 or so... because it'll start repeating itself).

Good luck.

Fair enough. I'll start reading as soon as I finish this deliverable and definitely before I call AA.

I appreciate the advice!

If reading important threads in FT is not your primary deliverable, you have your priorities reversed :)

Cheers.

What they will count, though, are flights that have been taken, but have not been posted. For example, if you flew yesterday or the day before, there is nothing stopping you from signing up for a retroactive challenge beginning on December 1 and getting those points to count towards the challenge, but only if they haven't posted. If they have posted, you're out of luck, as IceTrojan correctly noted already.

Mike