What if you fly BOS-LHR-SIN-SYD-LAX-BOS and stop less than 24 hours in each city? Do you get charged for the zero miles BOS-BOS?

But it is possible to set up an itinierary such that you can spend a day in LHR, BKK, HKG, and SIN without paying extra.

Looking at an itin. where I arrive in London at 8am, leave at ~10pm.

Arrive in BKK in the afternoon, leave the following morning.

Arrive in HKG in the morning, leave late that night.

Then on the way back, arrive in SIN in the morning and out at midnight.

All for the same mileage as BOS-SYD award.

Well Plato, so much for the much discussed and now de-bunked MPM theory! Glad to see the good news!

So what is the rule on doing
SYD-(BA)-LHR-(AA)-LAX-(QF)-AKL with no stopovers?
Would you only get charged the SYD-AKL mileage?

Not quite. You would be charged the greater of SYD-LHR or LHR-AKL. The open-jaw rule is that the charge is for the longest leg (unless this is a QF award in which case it is computed back to point of origin SYD).

Are you flying around on an award without any stops? I assume you're going to be staying in LAX.

Otherwise, you might get charged SYD-LAX + LAX-AKL = total trip miles. Or maybe SYD-LHR + LHR-AKL.

In any case, both legs get counted into the total miles for the purpose of the type of OW award you need. So LAX-SYD is 7,509 miles, and a RT on an oneWorld award would put you into a Zone6 AA award [14,001 - 20,000 miles].

[This message has been edited by Plato90s (edited 04-12-2002).]

Plato90s,
To clarify, my question was what mileage would I get charged if I went on a mad routing from SYD-LHR-LAX-AKL without stopping over at all?
(Just theoretical)
Jed

I don't know for sure, but I think the ticketing person would pick an end-point out of there.

As I said above, you'll either get charged

SYD-LHR + LHR-AKL

-or-

SYD-LAX + LAX-AKL

I don't think there's any possibility that the oneWorld desk would allow you to fly that route and charge you SYD-AKL mileage only. A simple sanity-check would doom that idea.

I've been told that the computer picks the end-point, and does so to make the open-jaw legs as similar in length as possible. For this example it will become SYD-LHR + LHR-AKL, and there is no leeway for the agent to change it. This game is only profitable if you have a need to visit a 3rd city for a few hours (transit instead of stopover), and save the mileage for routing to it (and the airline schedules allow a transit). I think the intent behind not counting the mileage to intermediate stops is to avoid penalizing you for the routing that an airline happens to implement (and which can change over time). This makes the plan fairer and more stable over time, without opening up significant loopholes for abuse (not that we'd be discussing such a topic here).