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Well, it seems that we had a rather hefty flight credit with American Airlines so we decided to take advantage of it. After we figured out that we wanted to go to London, not New York, not Mexico, no anywhere else did we call up AA to call in our old tickets. That's when the fun began.

Apparently, there is a rule that states you can only change a ticket for one that originates the same country. Normally, I'd be cool with this, but our previous AA flight was a one way from Dublin to LAX. So to use these ticket credits, we MUST fly out of Ireland. Oye.

So after some hunting around, we found that we should just book a flight to London and book a return from Dublin. We figured on just getting one of the many London-Dublin flights while we were there. So we found some very interesting bits. If you book an LAX to London flight, it will cost you about 500 to 1000 dollars per person one way. If you book a round trip, it will cost you about 700 dollars per person. Now, if you book a LAX-London-DUB flight, it will only run you about 325 dollars per person!! Yeah, you read that right. You save about 675 per person by flying into London and then hopping a plane to Dublin. So we booked our flight to London and then onto Dublin even though we have no intention of getting on the Dublin flight, at least not on that day. We're going to stay in London for about 6 or 7 days, then go back to the airport to get our connector to Ireland. Will it work? Who knows...but figure the worst that can happen is they'll make us pay for a flight to Ireland which is like 50-100 dollars per person...still a huge savings!

The good news is that we were able to book our one way back from Dublin and get 115 dollars in the form of a travel voucher back from AA. We then booked teh crazy LAX-Charlotte-London Gatwick-Dublin beast of a flight. But as stated before, we're just going to go through customs in London and head into town. Then we'll call the airline once we get into town and see what our options are.

BTW, we found an interesting site that has podcasted walking tours of London. I think we'll load up one of the Sansa Connects with these and see how they are.

UPDATE: I confirmed with some frequent flyer gurus that our skipping out on the last segment is ok. The keys are:

1. Book each segment separately: If you miss a segment, the airline will sometimes cancel the rest of your reservation. Meaning, if we had booked a round trip from LAX-DUB-LAX and skipped the London-DUB segment, we very well may have cancelled our DUB-LAX segment and would have been stranded in Europe.

2. Don't check any bags: No problem for us. We brought backpacks and survived for a month in Europe quite nicely. I can't imagine bringing big bags anywhere any more.

3. Book your London-DUB flight before you go: London immigration may be wondering why you only have a one way to London and a flight out of Dublin. They'll probably want to make sure you have conveyance booked that gets you out of their country (and off their welfare rolls).