I was told today that effective 1-1-05 all Oneworld awards will be limited to 16 segments. Even though you can claim awards with travel up to 50,000 miles, it seems AA wants to only e-ticket these records so their customers must suffer due to their (and Oneworld's) technological limitations.

In the scheme of things, this probably won't bother too many people. However, it will probably eliminate lots of in-country hopping on these awards and force members to use them for the long hauls.

For example, if I was going to do an around-the-world trip, I probably could not add lots of Qantas or AA domestic sectors within their respective countries even within the mileage allocation if it ran over 16 segments.

I know they have a rule like this for revenue RTW tickets, but I think I would gladly pay a reasonable fee for them to handwrite my ticket.

I will post this on the AA forum too.