I've rejoined this thread after snoozing it for a while, and got caught up on this year's posts so far, but I have a question for recent info: With an SWU in hand, without an EF account, and with total flexibility for timing and destination, is it still the case that we can generally find flights to Europe on AA's site? Or has that become tougher than it used to be because of the paid upgrade offer schema?

I only made the 175k milestone this year, and we're planning to do a Winter Market trip to Europe in early December - I've got enough miles to book us Flagship both ways (is that Z?) but that hurts - 900k or so.

So if I can feel relatively assured at being able to apply SWUs to the long leg of the out or inbound, I'll grab those as my reward, and use miles for the other direction.

I'm not opposed to getting an EF account for the purpose, but I haven't used it before and I'm not familiar with it - but that can change if need be.