American Airlines eliminated free stopovers in April 2014, killing the possibility of free one ways on American Airlines awards.

Introduction to Free One Ways (this post)
Free Oneways on American Airlines Awards (dead as of April 2014)
Free One Ways on United Awards
Free One Ways on Delta Awards
Free One Ways on US Airways Awards
Free One Ways on Alaska Airlines Awards
Three Vacations on Two Awards

A free oneway is a oneway itinerary to or from your home airport added on to another award for no additional miles.

Alex writes:

I’m a huge fan of your free one-way series although it left me bitter at the very beginning when I realized how many great opportunities I missed by redeeming my miles incorrectly. But I’m trying to fix it now. [Scott: I get a variation of this frequently.

I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at the Los Angeles Frequent Traveler University, being held November 30 - December 2 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel LAX.

My talk will be about free oneways on awards, probably under a title like Three Vacations, Two Awards: Adding a Free Oneway to Award Tickets.

American Airlines has added the ability to search Finnair and airberlin award space on aa.com! If you follow thepointsguy, View From the Wing, or One Mile at a Time, they all beat me to the story, so I'll try to add some valuable information if you want to book one of these airlines.

It's always great news when an airline adds the functionality to its award-booking engine. American Airlines has made big strides this year, so you can now book American, Alaska, Hawaiian, British, Qantas, Finnair, and airberlin online with your AA miles.

Last month, I got an interesting email from reader Ed that started:

Scott,

Please consider if this is viable, albeit challenging to book:

[UA]  DCA-BOS-YYZ-ORD-CLE-EWR // EWR-ZRH-IST, IST-IAD

The answer is yes it is possible, and what it means is that you can add a free circle trip onto roundtrip international United awards.

Hopefully readers of this blog are well acquainted with Free Oneways on United Awards, the most-read post I've written.

The central idea of free oneways is to take your free stopover at your home airport, then start a second trip from there on the same award.

Yesterday I talked about some great sweet spots on the US Airways chart for awards originating in South America. Maybe you thought that post was irrelevant for Americans.

But Americans can still get half the value of these sweet-spot awards by using open jaw itineraries.

US Airways sweet-spot awards can have tremendous value for Americans if they're employed as part of something I'll call a triangle award.

A triangle award is using three or more oneway itineraries to create a journey that includes two or more destinations.

Update: The trick in this post doesn't work anymore since American Airlines has eliminated all free stopovers on awards as of April 2014.

Yesterday's post greatly expanded the number of places you can get a stopover on American Airlines award by combining an AA award with a cheap Avios award. I'm sure many of your minds jumped to the big question: if you can get a cheap stopover almost anywhere, can you get a cheap oneway too? Yes!

We got great value out of the almost free stopovers outlined yesterday.

Regular readers know that there are four rules to getting a free stopover on AA awards. The first one is:
1) Stopovers must occur at the North American International Gateway City. The North American International Gateway City is the last city in North America you fly out of on awards to other regions from North America. On awards from other regions to North America, the North American International Gateway City is the North American city in which you first arrive.

After writing a series of posts on how to add free oneways to your awards on the major legacy carriers, I got a flood of emails from people who had just booked an award and wanted to know whether they should rebook with my award booking service. In some cases, it makes sense, and I'll share one such case.

Brian emailed me saying he had booked a roundtrip award with United miles from San Francisco to Entebbe, Uganda for 160,000 miles in coach because for his preferred dates, there had been no saver award space.