Originally Posted by
familyflyers
Sorry that I am not being clear. Let me try to rephrase.
Can US Air require that you book under their flight numbers and pay the higher mileage?
If one of your legs is a US Air only leg (no codeshare) but the rest are codeshares or are on partner airlines, will you still pay at the partner award level?
Let's say the ANA tool shows award availability only on the US Air flight numbers for 3 out of 4 legs. Is this still a partner award?
Completely ignore the codeshare aspect of flights when booking awards. It doesn't apply, you can't book codeshares on award tickets. CLT-MUC is operated daily as LH429. It's also US5608 and TK8590, possibly some others too. Doesn't matter - you can't book US5608 as an award. You'll be booking the actual flight # of LH429. And you can book LH429 whether US puts its codeshare number on it or not.
So this fact combined with the fact ANA is showing what's available at the "low" level - as there is only one level for *A and partner awards - means you don't need to be concerned about somehow being forced to redeem at a higher level for *A partners.