Originally Posted by andrzej
I'm surprised I and others missed this question earlier.
It's simple. AA will put a courtesy hold on a award booking for 2 weeks. If you don't ticket (meaning - pay with miles), the booking gets cancelled. At the end of 2 weeks you could start the process again, but remember, if the award seat availibility disappears, you're out of luck. And just because your seat got released back to inventory after the 2 week period, it does not mean it will automatically go back to award inventory.
If you really need this trip, I suggest you find a way to get the miles ASAP.
You could also go for the award ticket again at 13 days. It should let you do that, just change the name on the ticket to a variation of your own name (or whoever needs the ticket) so the records don't conflict. Then cancel the old one. That'll buy you another two weeks.
If at 13 days you find you can't do this, you best realize that ticket is about to become unavailable. You might be holding the last one, but if there's plenty of award inventory this will work.
I've had simultaneous reservations/holds on like a dozen first class award tickets at the same time for a couple days while I figured out what I was going to do -- matching those awards with paid travel for someone else, etc. It's not hard to do.
If you won't earn the miles for like 4 months it's probably more of a hassle than it's worth. But if you're flying soon and you want to keep this option open it's worth thinking about.