Does anyway one have any knowledge of booking and using a RTW AA/oneworld award ticket. I am researching a RTW trip in Business or First using the Distance Zone 9 award (35,001-50,000). The rules posted on-line for the award seem very vague. I am planning to max out this award with as many segments as possible, but I can only imagine dealing with an agent over the phone to get this done. Any tips or advise would be greatly appreciated.

It isn't a RTW award -- perhaps that helps to clarify it. The rules are extremely simple: mileage limited (50K in your example), 1 stopover per city and 2 transits per city (including stopover), must use at least 2 non-AA airlines in OW. Otherwise no limit on number of segments. However the hub structure of OW makes it difficult to overcome the 2 transits per city rule (e.g. CX only has 1 hub, so with this rule you can fly into HKG and then have 1 HKG-somewhere-HKG flight and you have now maxed out HKG and can't route through there ever again). But you could then fly HKG-BKK-SYD-NRT-MEL for example, unlike on paid OWE which prohibits backtracking continents. It is a very flexible award. For Europe you can be pretty creative (with hubs in DUB/MAD/HEL/LHR as well as minor hubs in MAN and BCN -- you could easily do over 20 segments in Europe and it would use up maybe 10K miles).

you could also do some segments in Asia without going to HKG example : BKK-SIN, BKK-BOM , DBX-BOM

Must your trip end in the same city it began?

No, but some programs (read: qantas) will calculate the distance back to the origin when computing miles. So if you did something like NYC-LON-MAD-HEL, it would be calculated as nyc-lon-mad-hel-nyc. On AA, its the actual mileage so nyc-lon-mad-hel.

Thanks, Darren. That was exactly the info I needed.

I am curious about the date changes and route changes. Are they allowed if seats are available? For me it would be very difficult to keep the same dates/routes for a ticket with 50,000 miles on it.

Date changes allowed, routing change is not allowed (not even change of airline on the same city pair). This makes getting inventory for a date change much harder.

Actually, again, it's very program dependant. If you are doing AA, then you get date changes even after ticketing. But with QF, once you begin your route, no changes whatsoever. Date, route, anything. The others fall somewhere inbetween.