Unable to change existing booking to AUH-JFK routing
To use up some AA miles before the devaluation, a few weeks ago I booked a First award BOM-AUH-LHR-SFO in early May, EY for the BOM-AUH-LHR leg and BA for the LHR-SFO leg.
Ideally I'd like to change this to The BOM-AUH-JFK-SFO to both remove the taxes and fees paid to fly out of LHR as well as getting a continuous chunk of time on the EY A380. When Etihad started releasing Guest First awards a couple days ago I gave AA a call to change my booking.
I called the Australian customer service center 3 times. The first one said they couldn't see availability and the second two said they were able to see availability and put together the itinerary but couldn't actually make the change. One of them claimed that Etihad uses "Journey Control" which was preventing the change while the other said they were seeing some error about "Indirect Access" preventing them from making the change.
Has anyone experienced this before? Is this just another case of HUACA?