For over a week I have been trying a combination of methods to get a fairly simple booking through but I'm not having any luck so I thought I would check if anyone could give me some pointers.

Basically I am trying to book a multiple destination award trip. I have only managed to pull the full itinerary up once, about two months ago. For the past week I have only been getting error messages and timeouts.

Ideally I am looking for NYC-JNB-NRT-SLC (but really it could be from/to anywhere in the US and anywhere in Japan) with about two weeks in JNB and NRT respectively. I can book every segment separately and there is plenty of availability and flight options, but as soon as I try to combine any of them (which I obviously need for the lower price) I get an error message, or it takes me to the calendar page but suddenly with zero availability.

Am I doing something wrong? Can I no longer to an Africa stop on the way to Japan? And if that's the case did the rules just change to disallow my type of routing? I have read every single fare rule document I could get my paws on and I cannot see why this shouldn't work.

I am lost, any insight is greatly appreciated, thank you.