Originally Posted by
maalloc
There's also a third option there: prepare your itinerary on ITA Matrix/Google Flight and call AF service line with your flight numbers ready.
They have more leeway than the website front-end -- albeit at a higher cost due to phone booking surcharge.
Indeed but even that, I think, is not quite as good as it used to be. In the old days, when you called an airline, they could manually make a booking and then send it to their fares department to check and 'manually' confirm conformity with the fare rules. Nowadays, I think that, except perhaps for things like RTW fares, you are pretty much at the mercy of what the computer says so that, even if in theory your itinerary is within the fare rules, if the computer says no, that is usually the end of it.