First my apologies since this doesn't specifically have to be about AA, but I don't see a forum that spans all FF programs for newbies. Or is there??

The good news is my 10-year wedding anniversary is coming up Summer 2012 so I am going to try and book award travel between DEN and ZRH or, perhaps, DEN to MIL (or VCE) and then return ZRH -> DEN.

That is the good part. The bad part is that I was only "enlightened" to points/award travel in Nov 2011 so trying to get enough pts for travel by this summer will be very tough. I will be getting my wife involved in some CC signups this month as well to help speed things up. The other bad thing is I've therefore never booked award travel. I went to a few US-based carrier websites such as American, Delta, United and US Air just to get an idea of how many points would be required for award travel. Thinking it would be nice to have those sleeper type of seats, I put in award travel in business/first for each respective airline and for both the r/t and multi-city approaches the point total came to like 400K and higher! Of course summer seems to be the Europe high sason. That point level may very well be impossible to get in time. Looking at the flight details I see it books every segment in that business/first class cabin so I was thinking I could save points by doing the DEN to int'l gateway city in economy/coach. Problem is that I see no way to break up cabin classes on the same itin for each segment. Is that even possible? Possible, but not directly using the online tools? I've never used ExpertFlyer, Hipmunk, etc, but it was my understanding you could punch in the actual codes/classes/fares desired into the search criteria by segment. Is that the only online method? I will try and read up on ExpertFlyer this evening. Or can you only do such a thing by calling customer service?

The only other idea that came to mind was to go with two separate bookings. On the first I'd pay cash for economy/coach to/from DEN and int'l gateway and then do a separate award booking itin for the transatlantic segments in business/first. Is that how you all typically handle this scenario? I guess this way would also help in that it would certainly be far fewer miles we'd need to rush to get.

Thanks a bunch.

-Mike