Just called AA to try to book a OW award ticket. Using the Great Circle Mapper the itinerary (HKG-SIN, SIN-CNS, CNS-SYD, SYD-MEL, MEL-AKL, AKL-SIN) was coming out just over 13,000 miles, which would fall under Zone 5 (10k-14K miles) and a 90K redemption rate for Y travel.

When the AAgent entered this info, she said it would cost 140K miles because it was between 25K and 35K miles. I said that there must be a mistake, but she insisted that this was the redemption rate the computer was giving her. After plenty of investigation, I realized it had me flying from Singapore to Tokyo and then down to Australia, along with several other odd routings.

Now I am not interested in going that far out of the way for the trip, but isn't the OW award structured to calculate direct point-to-point mileage between the originating and destination airport, or am I mistaken? The AAgent couldn't answer this...but kept falling back on the "that's what the computer says so I can't do anything about it routine" (very frustrating).

Just curious about this mileage calculation rule...doesn't look as if I'll be able to find any award travel from SIN to Australia in August in any case...but I may try my luck with another agent b/c this one didn't seem to understand much at all about the OW award as I had read it.

Thanks!