Question about stopovers
 

I've been reading about stopovers and am trying to wrap my head around it.

For context I have 125k AA and 70k UR. I'm hoping to go from Boston to Shanghai, then Japan, then back to Boston in April 2014. Is there any way I could make Shanghai a stopover or is that not at all possible assuming the flight path would go through Japan first? I only have barely enough miles to cover myself and a friend economy, so I'm trying to see where I can save and hopefully boost us up to at least business class. Thanks

This is really a question for the AA forum. However, what you want to do can not be done as one award. For AA's FFP, the only place one can stop over is at the North American gateway city. Since you want to stop over in China, you must have an award Boston-China, then an award China-Japan, and finally an award Japan-Boston.

Well, I was hoping to use 60K AA and 7.5k BA via UR per person so I figured it was oneworld.

Ah OK, so I will just have to book everything individually and not have a stopover then? Because I read a post about stopovers in Europe, so I wasn't sure about its use within a given continent.

You cannot have a stopover in Europe, either (while using AA miles).

Just FYI, because the question is posted in the oneworld forum.

If you have Asiamiles, the oneworld Multi-carrier award permits 5 stopovers anywhere.

On AA Partner awards you are only allowed a stopover at the US gateway.

Assuming you are inquiring about economy awards, that there is availability for your dates, and that the flights shown for this year are still available next year, then:

There is a direct flight AA 289 from BOS-PVG (1 stop in ORD) so your assumption that you would be going through Japan first isn't necessarily the case. An AA award is 35K. Or if you prefer flying through NRT on JL then an AA All Partner award would also be 35K.

Your flight from PVG-NRT would be an AA All Partner award for 20K.

Your flight from NRT-BOS, whether direct on AA or on a partner would be 32.5K (or 25K for Oct 1 - Apr 30).

So for the above using AA or AA All Partner awards it would be 87.5K per person.

Now AA does have AA oneworld Explorer awards based on total mileage flown, which allow stopovers, but generally are worse in terms of mileage required. In your case, assuming as many direct flights as possible (BOS-PVG/PVG-NRT/NRT-BOS), it would be 100K miles. The mileage range for this award is 14001-20000 miles, so since your itinerary is currently 15001 miles in length, you still have 3999 miels to play with. You could add another stop if you like; for example BOS-JFK-HKG/HKG-PVG/PBG-NRT/NRT-BOS. Use Mileage Monkey to calculate the mileage of your journey.

You may wish to check out the thread http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...ld-awards.html for the ins and outs of AAdvantage awards.

You can always buy miles if your short, or if you prefer to fly business class. After all purchasing 60K miles for $1650 will put you in a much more comfortable seat for such a long flight, free baggage allowance, and lounge access, if business awards seats are available. Each of you are allowed to purchase 60K miles per calendar year. So by Jan 2014 you could actually purchase 120K each. The nice thing is AA allows you to hold awards for 5 days so you can confirm your seats before having to drop $ on purchase of miles. Also wait for AA promos for buy miles. One just ended on August 1, which actually wasn't that good a promo. They often run discounts and/or mileage bonus promos. Watch the AA forum for these as the folks on there will give it their blessing, or not. As a general rule of thumb, if you can get miles for about 2¢ each (or on rare occasions less), then that's pretty good.

You also may want to start your research now as to availability 330 days out to see what kind of availability is coming up for 2 people on the routes you prefer.

OK, now that you have links to all the tools, and have been given a primer in the rules, go check it out.