I'm on the phone with AAdvantage again for the second time today. We got a oneworld First class award for use in December. This morning, I called the AAdvantage Plat Desk to drop one flight within Africa (CPT-JNB) and move our JNB-HKG flight to one day earlier. This morning, the agent said that was fine, no charge for the changes. She sent me the supposed updated tickets via email and the changes are not reflected on the eticket. So I called AAdvantage Plat Desk again and this person tells me the reservation was changed but not the ticket. Furthermore, they'll have to charge me $100 per ticket for the change.

This is the first oneworld award I've ever used, so is it, indeed, true that there is a change fee for oneworld awards as opposed to AAdvantage awards? I've looked on the oneworld website and can't come up with this rule. Thanks for your help.

The fee could be due to the routing change (though I'm not sure if a fee applies normally). If you dropped a flight you were ticketed on, then that's a change of routing. But there should be no fees for simple date changes, even in Y class.

The outcome: the AAgent I spoke with said that they would waive the fee this time, but no more changes are allowed, even date changes with same routing, without a fee. So I have the routing I want, but hope noting else needs to be changed in the next 4 months.

The AAdvantage rules for OW awards are no routing changes, at any price, and date changes are free. They did you a major favour (technically the only way to do a routing change is to redeposit the award and issue it from scratch, which includes losing any reserved space you already have!). Be sure to say good things about how wonderful AA is, wish they would do such favours for me. The other OW airlines have far more restrictive rules for awards (BA would not allow a date change, much less a routing change, for this same award, as well as charging roughly triple the miles). Note that the OW award rules are completely different from the other AA award rules!

In Nanook's defense, only in the airlines' twisted little world is dropping a segment considered a "routing change".

No it isn't. In any normal view of routing it's a change. If a bus service normally does A -> B -> C -> D but then changes its route to bypass C and go straight from B -> D , then any normal person I know would view that as the route of the bus changing

Dave