Originally Posted by
WillTravel4Food
When you're planning for school vacations, waiting until the last minute doesn't work very well. We're booking ITM-HND-SFO awards now. At some point when cash fares seem reasonable, we'll buy the connection SFO-SEA. I set several EF alerts if T space opens up at some point. If anything becomes available, I'll cancel the cash purchase and add the flight to the existing awards.
Be very careful when adding new flights to existing awards, AS agents are a shell of what they used to be so many will just cancel your booking and try to book the entire thing again, which will often lead to failure and losing your existing bookings.