This is a new one for me, and I’ve not seen mentioned elsewhere. AA web special award pricing now depends on whether you are traveling one-way or round trip.
Example:
ORD-LHR for 2 pax on 5/18/22. Business class web special on AA 806 prices at 84k per person.
When searched as a round trip, outbound on 5/18 and returning on 5/25, the outbound leg on AA 806 prices at 69.5k per person.
So the one-way is pricing higher than the same exact flight on a half-round-trip basis. This is feeling more and more like Delta award pricing every day. For those of you who say award charts are unimportant, 400k one-way business class TATL awards are here now too.
This is also a big devaluation for anyone that booked multiple one-way awards instead of round trip/multi-city to have the greatest flexibility in tweaking/making changes to one part of the trip as award inventory changes over time.
(And no, for those of you looking at the time stamps of my screenshots, it’s not because inventory is tied up by the round trip. I searched the one-way first, then the round trip, and repeated several times with the same results.)