AA award rules
 

Hello! I am a newbie to this program. I got the Citi AA card and accrued more than 75k miles. My questions for redeeming OW partner flights:

1. What are the charges for canceling or changing an award flight on partner airlines?

2. What are the sweet spots of this program? I can see some transpacific flights being of affordable (though not the best) value, if there are availabilities.

3. What are the stopover rules?

I have done some research on blogs, but could not find great and recent answers to my questions. I would appreciate your help. Thanks a million!

1) There is no charge to cancel any award booked with AA miles.

2) Any business or first class award you can find that involves partner carriers will still be at a fixed rate and thus a "sweet spot". Also some domestic and short haul awards are not bad deals either. Just search aa.com to get a feel for what costs what.

3) Stopovers are not allowed on any award booked with AA miles.

JJeffrey gave good answers. Allow me to add a few things.

1. If the change is something you want/need to do, changing an awards itinerary involves canceling the existing itinerary online. The miles are reinstated quickly and without any fee. You would then make a new points reservation for the new itinerary, very possibly requiring more points. If there's a major schedule change (greater than 4 hours) that doesn't work for you, then an AA phone agent can move you to flights that work better for you, even if those flights would require more points. (I just did this for an American Airlines flight, not for a partner flight.)

2. If you're able to plan far in advance (around 11 months), points requirements can sometimes be much lower or there can be availability for flights that will soon become unavailable. This is especially true for American Airlines flights, but I've also seen this with partner flights.

3. Itineraries with stopovers (such as spending a few days in a city where you would connect anyway) are treated as separate flights. No free stopovers. There may be cases when a connection is very long (such as when the second segment does not depart until the following day), in which case you could think of it as a short stopover on a single ticket.

Specifically, for international itineraries, "a stopover occurs when there's a break in travel of at least 24 hours." So, you could arrive at a particular airport at 7pm, and as long as the continuing flight is scheduled to depart by no later than 6:59pm the next day, it's a connection and not a stopover. I frequently use this when departing internationally to take the flight from my originating city to the hub airport where my int'l flight departs the following day. This makes it much less likely that I'll miss the long-haul flight due to a problem on my initial flight.

Is it easy to choose a connecting segment that departs further from the first segment? Thank you again.

I don't want to be a Debbie downer, but awards for transpacific flights are EXTREMELY hard to get. I have not been able to get any (no matter how many points) for at least 7 years. These are in high demand and usually are scooped up by frequent flyers with the operating airlines. Good luck with your searches, but be ready with a backup plan. Diligence and persistence are key to most award finds.

Finding transpacific award flights in J/F hasn't been that difficult for me.

Currently I have award trips for next year booked to Fiji & Australia (Fiji Air and Qantas), and Japan & Tahiti (JL and Air Tahiti Nu). All flights were found/booked with less than a handful of 'search sessions'. All J or F.

The key I think is having at least some amount of flexibility. You have to be willing to a) grab an available award that is reasonably around the time frame you want to visit, and then tailor your dates & trip around the award flights, and b) be willing to take a positioning flight if necessary, one that you may end up having to pay for.

If you have little or no flexibility, i.e., you're looking to travel LAX - Sydney and back on two specific dates in January, in F on the A380 on Qantas, yes -- it might be years, if ever, before you find an award. Add maybe more years if a same ticket award seat up front on a connecting flight to LAX is a deal-breaker.

Close in on JAL is fairly consistent. Within a week or so of departure I can usually find plenty of availability.

Not anymore. Practically all close-in availability that used to be consistently opening up 2 weeks or less before departure vanished a few months back, at least on Japan-US routes.

At least as of last month, JL award space did still open like clockwork at the end of the schedule.

That's how I was able to grab JFK-HND in F, stalking and refreshing around 2am. Suddenly it was just sitting there for the taking.

Still, I admit that felt extraordinarily lucky on my first try for a JL award, even it had been consistently written about on FT.

(Deleted.)

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...731451627.jpeg
Second search 8 out of the next 13 days.
My first search on the middle of a Saturday. I have been searching this route the past couple of weeks and have seen a similar pattern. End of schedule has looked the same as well.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...25ed15de6.jpeg
5 days over the next 11.