I used AA gift cards to purchase a ticket from the RTW desk a few months ago. At that time, I had five GCs but could only use 4 for the ticket, as the agent said the system wouldn't accept a fifth.

I see now that the AA gift cards page says you can use a maximum of 8 GCs per ticket, so I assume they've upped the limit.

However, places that sell physical gift cards often only carry cards of certain values. For example, giftcertificates.com doesn't seem t sell AA cards above $250. So 8 $250 cards is only $2,000, which isn't much for a RTW ticket (which might be $8k or more for business class).

Would it be possible to get around the limit by purchasing several fully-refundable tickets using GCs, and then canceling them? I assume AA would issue the refund as either a new GC or a voucher. But if one were to use, say, 8 $250 GCs to buy a $2,000 ticket, the refund would be in the form of one GC or voucher for $2,000, right? So if one did this, say, four times, one could end up with four gift cards or vouchers, and could then use all four for one new ticket?

With the current double-miles and threshold-bonus-miles deals, it seems a great way to earn miles would be to buy gift cards from giftcertificates.com and use them for future tickets.