Getting the Magic Dashes on AAdvantage Reservations

Update – 4/8/2014, this one has gone the way of the dodo… no more free one ways due to a change in American Airlines policy…

You simply cannot book a flight using AAdvantage Miles without maximizing the stopover rules, it basically means that you get half your next trip paid for, the key to this is making sure that you travel between two different American Airline Reward Zones, such as North America and Europe.

Here is how it works – NYC-SFO is 12.5K AAdvantage using the Economy MileSAAver ticket (low cost award) from AA so you get roundtrip for 25K AAdvantage Miles.

On a completely separate note you can fly New York to Paris for 20K AAdvantage during the off peak season (30K otherwise) so, if you catch it right in terms of timing you could think of that SFO-NYC as a credit towards your future NYC-CDG ticket, and instead of paying 20K AAdvantage for it you would pay the difference between your 12.5K and the 20K.  All told, NYC-SFO RT plus a one way to Paris for 32.5K.

The things to remember are that you can only do this from Gateway Cities which include:

LAX, NYC, MIA, ORD, SFO, BOS, DFW, RDU and a whole lot more if you are flying on Partner Airlines:

List of AAdvantage North American Gateway Cities (Including Partners)

If you live near any of these airports you simply have to think one and half trips in advance when booking travel as overall this will mean every 2 Trips you pay for you get one for Free, and they are on airmiles anyway so even ‘freer’.

Finding a  legit routing for your trip will mean that you need to change AA Zones, you cannot stopover in North America on your way to a free one way to Mexico or the Caribbean as American thinks of this as the same North America Zone, it would price out as three separate legs like below:

However, if you were to change the zone to Europe for that Paris trip it would be fine, you know you have struck gold when you see the Magic Dashes on the middle flight – SFO to NYC of the flights like below:

Here you can see the amazing value you can add – we are already set on going from New York to San Francisco this year to stay at the Hyatt in Big Sur, as it seems like a great use of our 2 Free Nights from Chase – Post Link. Now we have the chance to head on over to Paris, or anywhere else in Europe for only 7.5K AAdvantage more, it is a no-brainer.  And it works on the way back too, we wouldn’t just come back from Paris-New York, that would be too simple.  Instead we would stopover in New York, then head on somewhere else.

Just remember, you have to take that ‘last leg’ of the flight within a year of you booking the ticket.  We’re currently doing this twice already this year as we fly:

San Juan-NYC (stopover 2 months) NYC-Zurich (20K AAdvantage Total)

Then:

Zurich – NYC (Stopover 3 months) NYC-Toronto (another 20K AAdvantage Total)

Pretty neat huh?  I had some trouble planning this as I was hoping to head to Cancun later on in the year, or maybe in the spring, but I got some Twitter help from Amol (@pointstopointB) who has done this a few more times than me.  He explained the issue with the way American Airlines viewed Mexico when doing things like this. Check out an interesting post of his here on the Explorer Award from American Airlines on HackMyTrip: http://hackmytrip.com/2013/01/aa-explorer-award/

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