Originally Posted by
guv1976
The length of the connection is irrelevant. Some airlines employ married-segment availability on award travel. That means that you can only book each of the legs on an award if you book them together; the individual segments will not be available as stand-alone redemptions.
There is also reverse-married-segment availability, whereby individual segments will be available as stand-alone redemptions, but will not be available when attempting to book them as part of a connection.
Not that it really makes any sense when dealing with awards. More likely, I would guess, that this was set up for some paid fares but somehow it propagated to awards. With paid fares, can serve for gathering extra connection business from outside their regular (taken for granted) catch basin. But awards are just meant to fill empty seats, or to "sell" them to partner airlines, in which case it should make no difference.