Originally Posted by dukerau

You could book DEL-HEL-JFK/LGA-XNA all on one award, but it would price at 45k, so you save miles by separating it. I will note that one advantage of paying the extra 5k miles to book it all together is that AA allows free routing changes. So if something better opens up, you could change it (i.e., something much cleaner like DEL-DOH-ORD-XNA). If you book separately, while changes are still allowed, you'd have to keep DEL-HEL and HEL-XNA as start/end points of 2 separate awards.