talkandfly

FWIW, I've had some pleasant experiences booking international awards flights of late. What wold ordinarily take a lot of struggle, did not. I used DM to book a complex itinerary to multiple cities in Asia about a month ago. Concerned about the ordeal, I poured a coffee, opened KVS/Kayak/USAirways/BA/JAL and called.

in the 'pm days' I would have needed to call and often hang up to get a new agent (because they could never find the flights I was seeing) and despite all the advanced knowledge I had, the process would take hours. This time, despite open jaw and a stopover, and the complication of one of the legs disappearing from availability while we were working on the trip, the entire itinerary was arranged and booked in an hour.

Then, the two FFP's merged. What happened at the same time as that transition, was that a family event caused me to need to change the Asian itinerary. Again, fully armed with my research into options on the new dates, I called. The only minor glitch was that AA could not "find" the itinerary and transferred me to a US Airways agent. To my delight, we were able to rebook everything (almost) with no fees. The only thing that I lost was one leg in the US that we had to eliminate because of the AA open jaw rules (a bit more stringent that the old DM rules).

And, the context of all of this is that I dropped from years of CP (a lot less travel last year) and am now AA Plat, and it still was a reasonable experience.