Originally Posted by
emaij
I just booked an AAnytime award SAN-ORD-YUL. The SAN-ORD leg was available in F using a saaver award (25,000). The ORD-YUL leg had only one cabin and 15 seats available but no saaver awards so I was going to have to use an AAnytime award.
Since I'm spending 25,000 anyway, why not allow for a combined award at 25,000 or upgrade me if the F cabin is available when I check in? Could be a good elite perk.
Upgrading on award tickets is a separate issue, but I agree it would be fair to let you combine award types. It used to be that you couldn't fly F one way and Y on the return; IIRC, you also couldn't fly Saver one way and Anytime the other. These restrictions went away when they added one-way awards.
So allowing you to combine F saaver and Y anytime on separate segments within a single one way is really just an extension of that. A simple rule would be that you could book any segment/award type that prices at or below the total award mileage.
Of course, while it would be fair, AA doesn't have a whole lot of incentive to do this. Most award redeemers only see a lack of available saver awards on their desired trip and don't even realize that it may only be one segment that's missing. It'd be a big cost to implement the IT, and they're certainly worrying about bigger issues these days (blame bankruptcy! blame the merger!).