Originally Posted by nyc6035

A few things I've done with this over the last two or three months to get around some of this:

1) when prompted by an agent to do so where they couldn't see the segment on their system to upgrade up to U class from T in a previously mixed award reservation, I booked the segment, held the record on aa.com and gave them the new PNR - and then they combined the record somehow to upgrade the original record.
2) I've also been instructed it's ok to book the AA segments available online (like say jfk-lax-hkg) and then call them to add the unbookable segments (e.g. CX hkg-tpe)
3) I have in the last 5 days fed an agent individual CX segments (jfk-hkg-xxx) when they didn't find it initially on their system. This was a CX/KA only booking.

Notwithstanding the commentary around compromising the agents, this is all within the routing rules and in my view very reasonable as I do not believe the following things should be considered controversial:

1) Upgrading a coach segment on a Biz/First award where the segment is available alone or paired in (other) multi-segment award trips
2) Stringing together AA and non-AA partner flights where I strongly suspect the system can't possibly consider all combinations (they already have a fairly new rule to limit one way awards to 4 segments)
3) Pulling together segments individually for partner flights which you can't book online

My view is, I've earned the miles, the flights are within rules and agents are willing to undertake the transactions - there is nothing wrong with this approach.