Welcome to AA's new knife in the back program "initiative" - Milesaaver.

Read the threads regarding what Milesaaver means to you, especially with respect to domestic 25K "base-level" awards...and you'll know what's up AND why you can't find seats to Vegas, Orlando, and numerous other travel destinations.

MikeSil, FWIW, I have used aadvantage awards for years to Las Vegas, and to numerous other domestic US cities....some booked well ahead (months), while some booked days ahead.....for years and years. Often with my entire family, occasionally just myself. You keep trying to make it seem as if *everyone else* is wrong to even think they should have a right to be able to reserve a domestic 25K award....and that the "expectation" should not be so. You couldn't be more wrong...until 2004. Now, by default, and through no ingenious discovery on your part, your assertion(s) are technically correct. All over the AA thread we see substantial docuimentation of what Milesaaver is, what is has done, and what it will likely do to adversely impact the domestic 25K award traveler going forward, so its no great secret any longer what AA has done to their base-level travelers trying to find a "planaahead" award seat.

Lets call a spade a spade, ok ? Milesaaver, a newly-implemented initiative to replace the award formerly known as the PLANAAHEAD, is a severe capacity controlling scheme which will make domestic 25K awards less and less available until, and IF THEN, last minute when AA's computer sense the seat(s) won't get sold and they [AA] begrudgingly dole out the 25K award seats to last minute flyers. Since I don't know many people who will let their vacation plans rest on a 5-day notice award seat...in effect, AA has just introduced a highly-effective capacity control on their base level domestic 25K seat. What is the effect on me and my discretionary travel ? Has driven me to orbitz.com and travelocity.com and completely, thoroughly, trashed my loyalty to AA. Why bother ?

Milesaaver represents a 100% overhaul of the AAdvantage approach to making domestic 25K seats/awards available from over a decade of flying and miles accumulation I've been a part of.

In response, I have now also diverted easily over $350K of charges in last 2.5-3 months from my Citibank/Aadvantage card...to competing card products. Why accumulate now mostly-worthless AAdvantage miles if one can't use them ? As word gets out of this AA scheme, ie people throughout the summer find they cannot book basic domestic 25K awards to destinations they wish to travel...I suspect the vaunted AAdvantage program will begin to see interesting anomolies in accrual patterns.