Originally Posted by
channa
You realize that the other carriers do not waive change fees for their Elites, and the Big 3 standard fee is $200. Also, SDC fees can be more. So while this is not a positive change, AS is still better by a decent margin.
That depends on what you book. On international award bookings, AA allows many types of changes for free. (The main one it charges for is change of main carrier from OW to non-OW or v.v.) UA has lots of partners and you can often get what you want at one time.
For international awards, AS charges an extra fee in the first place and additionally has more limited availability than other partners (on CX, etc) and terrible availability on some of its own routes. This makes it way more common with AS to need to book part of an award and then make changes to it later when connecting segments become available.