Originally Posted by
hawaii-bound
I had a similar situation this week. You can call AA up to an hour before the flight to cancel the award ticket. You will have a year from the award booking date to use the award as booked, but you must retain the ticket number.
While this is true if you cancel the entire award ticket, it's not true if you just want to miss one flight. There will be no value left on the award ticket once the first 3 segmnets are used.
To the OP: you can change the date of award travel without a change fee, so long as you don't change the destination. I've never tried what you're suggesting on skipping the last flight if you can never switch the flight, but I can't imagine any fee for no-showing the last flight. After all, IAD-AUA-IAD costs the number of miles as IAD-AUA-MIA.