This is my very first post, so please forgive me if my questions are repetative. I'm fairly new to awards travel, and many of these posts are above anything I can comprehend at this time!

Okay, here is my story. DH and I have about 70,000 miles right now. We want to travel to Southeast Asia in October or November of 2007, which is still about a year and a half away. We have several trips planned before then, including one to Ireland and one to Croatia, although we won't earn miles on the overseas portion of the Croatia trip as we will be flying BA and transatlatic flights don't accumulate miles. We are also planning on selling our house early next year and purchasing a new house, and will probably use the deals featured on AA.com to earn miles for that. So basically long story short; we won't have enough miles accrued for the business-class tickets until probably March or April of next year.

We would like to fly from St. Louis to Hong Kong/Singapore to St. Louis on business class seats, although we are certainly open on where to fly into/out of if we can get the awards seats. Here are my questions. I understand that many book awards seats almost a year in advance. Because we won't have sufficient miles before then, we can't book until probably March or April of next year. We are open on when we go to Southeast Asia; only that we want to go in October or November. Do you think it will be possible to get business-class tickets in March or April for an October or November flight?

Also, do I pick out the flights that I want, or does the AA agent do that? I would prefer to fly Cathay Pacific and/or Singapore airlines, as I have heard great things about both, but don't know if I have a say so in that or not.

One other thing; I have a question about the stopover. If our flight has, say, a layover in Tokyo, we can choose to stay there for a few nights and then move out with our itinerary? I'm assuming it has to be a city that we would have a layover in, and Tokyo seems to be the most common on the routes that we would be taking.

Thank you all so very much for any help you can give me. Doing research for this can be quite daunting!

Tracy