For pitflyer's benefit on a different thread, I was doing some research on how the new ticketing system handles multi-pax award itineraries...and ran into some problems. My guess is that these are probably legacy problems, and that they could have factored into the troubles Firewind had.

I did an award seat search for two passengers one way in July, selected a N/S flight, and got the "You do not have enough Rapid Rewards Ticketless Awards for this trip" message. That's pretty strange because I have three award coupons available and should have only needed two coupons for that itinerary. I wondered what would happen if I changed the booking request to one passenger; it turned out I was allowed to do that. The system, however, selected an award coupon with a May 2010 expiration date, even though at least one award coupon with a late August expiry was available for this July booking. This appears to be another issue related to multiple awards issued on the same date. (As noted elsewhere, I had a lot of RR credits post last summer.)

A side note that probably should be posted somewhere else: there has been a lot of consternation in the past about the inability to check award seat availability when you don't already have enough awards in your account. Lately I have noticed the system works a bit differently than what I remembered from the past: if you have no awards you cannot check flight-specific availability at all, and that has not changed. If, however, you have at least one award available (or one award coupon if checking a one-way single award coupon itinerary), you can check availability for up to eight passengers. If you don't have enough awards available to book the flights you'll get the error message when attempting to move beyond the flight detail page. IIRC, in the past posters such as katy1579 have had trouble checking award seat availability for the desired number of pax when there not enough available awards. It seems it previously was not possible to see even the flight selection screen if there were not enough awards available. (My recollections may be completely erroneous, however.)

So once again it seems to me that folks in a situation similar to Firewind's should have some strong arguments for not having to pay multiple award extension fees for two or more expired award coupons.