In the past, before kids, I had no problem booking my wife's award ticket on a separate flight than my paid flight. It was fun to listen to Channel 9 as her NH flight "raced" against my UA flight to NRT.
Now that we have kids in tow, I need to book the same flights, and had just gone through an experience a couple weeks ago SNA-TPE. It seems the award itineraries come from a completely different bucket, and the saver awards were *A routing through ICN, whereas paid tickets were routing through NRT. Based on past experience, I booked the awards first, via ICN, then priced the same itinerary with an agent (the website wouldn't even show me the routing). It priced at $4500 in coach!
I guess savers were only available on via ICN because everyone was buying up seats via NRT, but why won't the website show me the same routing, even if I used multi-stop and entered each one manually?