Award Flight to Anchorage using multi-city option
 

I have been looking to try to book flights to Alaska in August using miles. When I plug in GRR (or DTW, ORD) to ANC for the dates I need, there is no availability. I did check out how the available award seats on other dates are constructed. Many fly GRR - DFW - SEA - ANC. They price at either 12.50 for saver or 25,000 for business saver.

I can construct an award ticket using the multi-city option for the dates I want GRR - DFW - SEA - ANC for either saver or business saver awards, but the ticket prices out at 2-3 times more award miles. Why would it do that? If I call an agent, will they be able to ticket the award at the lesser price?

Thanks for your help. This just doesn't make sense to me. I don't think I'm trying to break any rules.

If you have saver availability by segment (T for coach, U for business) but not for the itinerary origin-xxx-destination, you may have:

1. Connection times too long (and so a stopover, not a connection)

2. An invalid routing origin to destination

3. An example of married segment availability applied to awards

I believe one can dismiss #2 on the basis of this allowable routing from ExpertFlyer for an AA fare GRR-ANC.

MAP CONSTRUCTED LEFT TO RIGHT AND RIGHT TO LEFT
1. GRR-DFW/CHI-PHX/LAX-PHX/LAX-ANC
2. GRR-DFW/CHI-PHX/LAX-SEA/PDX-ANC

If you're mixing and matching award types (e.g. some segments in business and some in coach), you will need agent help to do the voluntary downgrade on the coach segments and use the business award for the entire itinerary.

This is assuming the points 1-3 above.

#1 could also be too short a connection. But if the exact same flights are available as a single award on other days, that would indicate that the problem is not #1 or #2.

And I thought married segments resulted in A-B being unavailable when A-B-C was available, not preventing an otherwise valid routing when the segments were available individually?

I called American this morning I walked through the itinerary with an agent. She agreed that it didn't break any rules and couldn't say why it priced the award as high as it did. She told me to reserve and hold the segments online and then call them back to have the award repriced correctly. Hopefully, that will work.

When you build an award itinerary using multi-city, aa.com will automatically price each segment separately, whether it should be one award or not. So even a simple itinerary such as LGA-DFW-LAX with a 1 hr. connection would price as 12.5k + 12.5k if built using multi-city.

What the AAgent suggested should work, I've done similar things several times when aa.com couldn't price the award correctly.

Another options is to find one of the other dates where aa.com offers GRR-DFW-SEA-ANC correctly as a single award, and put that on hold. Then call and switch to your preferred date. That way, there's no question about what the award price should be.