Is this possible? How does this work? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.

It's called OneWorld Award. Basically it's based on mileage flown in straight line, not the actual mileage flown as long as you don't stop at the connection points for more than 6 to 24 hours (it depends).

So for example, if you wanted to fly to and stop in the following cities:

New York-London-Moscow-Hong Kong-Tokyo-Los Angeles-New York, the mileage would be based on the actual straight line mileage between the cities regardless if you had to let's say connect through London AGAIN after visiting Moscow and before heading to Hong Kong. There are also some rules to consider. I believe you can not connect through the same city more than twice and that includes a stopover. You have to use 2 OneWorld partners and AA does not count. What that means is that you don't have to fly AA at all, but you will need at least 2 out of the remaining 7 OneWorld partners in order to make this bookable. You can't use BA from US to London. Few other rules.

Here is a chart of mileage requirements:

<b>http://makeashorterlink.com/?L3636566B</b>

here is a good way to figure out mileage between the STOPPING points only:

<b>http://gc.kls2.com/</b>
You will have to know the 3 letter codes for the cities.

and finally check and post any questions on

<b>www.flyertalk.com</b>

the OneWorld forum. There are many experts there to help you fine tune your itn, but they do get upset a little if they see you have not done any homework first.

You can only use AA's OneWorld partners(British Airways, Cathay Pacific, FinnAir, Iberia, Lan, AerLingus and Qantas). You can not use any other AAdvantage partners.

Let's take the above example:

JFK-LHR-SVO-HKG-NRT-LAX-JFK - which is 19,225 straight line miles. It would take 100K miles for economy, 130K miles for business and 180K miles for first class.

But as I stated above, some of these routes are not possible to do in straight line with OW partners.

So your itn may actually look something like this:

JFK-LHR-SVO-(lhr)-HKG-NRT-LAX-JFK - which would make the ACTUAL mileage flown - 22,340, but you will still be charged only for the first mileage.

What's great about this award is that you have a year to complete this trip and you only have to pick the first departure date when booking. So for example. You could do JFK-LHR, then buy a cheap R/T ticket from LHR back home. Come back few months later to LHR and continue with the rest of the trip. Obviously there would be extra cost involved in this situation but it's great for people that could only do 1 or 2 week trips at a time because of other commitments.

Not a bad award if you consider that a regular US-Europe R/T in F is 125K miles.

There are many, many possibilities, including Africa, Australia/NZ and South America, but I hope I provided the basic idea of how this award works.

Good luck!

AAFrequentFlyer, thanks for your help.

You must know the AA website inside and out, could you please let me know where on AA's website I can get info about the One World Award.

Thanks.