It's possible that AA decided to drop the fee that I mentioned. it's still a hassle to use AA frequent flyer miles to book since they limit the number of seats. We once qualified to get 2 tickets to anywhere in the world AA flew(it wasn't FF miles but nevertheless it was similar) . We wanted to fly to Tokyo and since we are both retired, we could fly any time on any day no matter how far in the future. We AA had no seats at any time up to 9 months into the future on any day that we could use. Buh bye AAdvantage card. There were other reasons why we dropped the card as well.