I'm not sure how widely it's known, but you can buy near-instant-delivery electronic gift cards for AA on ebay at face value. While, at first glance, this might not seem terribly useful, it can be -- because you can often "buy" ebay money at less than full price. This week, for example, if you have a Target red card, you can use a cashback site to buy discounted Target gift cards from Cardpool (instant delivery), take those to Target.com to buy on-sale ebay gift cards (about a two-hour delay in issuance), and then use another cashback site to buy AA gift cards on ebay from Paypal Digital.

The net results of all this is the ability to buy essentially unlimited AA tickets for about 20% off with a few key strokes and a couple hours delay. In the meantime, you can put your reservation on hold at AA for ticketing.

I've encountered only one problem in buying such tickets: it is important to wait for your ticket to actually be issued (you get an actual ticket number) before using the same gift card to buy other tickets in different PNRs. The reason is that AA doesn't actually "drain" your gift card until the ticket is issued, so confusion can result if you use the same gift card to ticket a subsequent reservation. But if you avoid this glitch, the process is pretty darn painless, and worth the modest extra effort.