Not sure that having the beginning of the trip within the 330 day period will get you bookings for later flights on your trip that are occuring more than 330 days out.

True, but given the 14-day hold on a partial itinerary (offered by AA), I start the booking process at 340-342 days before the last segment. (This of course assumes the itinerary spans more than 14 days, such as the one proposed by the OP.)

I called AA Aadvantage Reservations this morning and was told they could start booking me now, reopen the hold every time a date comes within the 330 days and then book me through without losing my dates. I hope they are right....

Anywho, I've settled on where I want to go and when. Regrettably, I don't have Expert Flyer (living off of government loans, I keep my non-school related purchases/memberships to an absolute minimum), so I don't have a clue about availability.

A few questions for the experts out there:

1) If my preferred routing is not available (e.g. SCL-AKL), may I request to be routed SCL-DFW-LAX-AKL, or SCL-DFW-LAX-HKG-AKL?

2) W/O Expert Flyer is there any easy way (I've dowloaded the OW schedule) to look up all possible flight routings between 2 cities so I can suggest routings to the AAgents. (I've found that often if you -the customer - have an idea it goes quicker than if the AAgent has to go looking).

Here's my schedule (again it's a OW Business Award):

July 28 (2007): WAS-EZE
July 31: EZE-SCL
August 6: SCL-AKL
August 15: AKL-SYD
August 17: SYD-ASP
August 20: ASP-CNS
August 24: CNS-BNE
August 26: BNE-LAX

And that's it. I'll have to buy a cheap oneway to get home from LAX, but with SW going LAX-BWI, I'll be fine there.

Thanks Again for all of the help!

Yes. But, you're still subject to the 16-segment limit.

Get a QF account (free) and use their very nifty award-search engine to check availability. (It won't show availability for every OW route, but it's pretty impressive.)

Tip du jour: When using the QF tool, you'll sometimes run into a situation where you cannot query a given o/w segment because your origin does not appear in the list of cities (e.g., SCL). A workaround in these cases is to select an r/t using your desired destination as the origin (e.g., LAX-SCL-LAX) with a dummy outbound segment; then you'll be able to check the return segment (SCL-LAX).

or SCL-LAX-AKL, for better J and less segments than SCL-DFW...

By the way, there's nothing available SCL-AKL (direct on LA) on your dates; first direct flight you could take, at present, is on the 11th.

SCL-LAX-HKG-SYD-AKL looks available for 06Aug.

Just a thought, but often one can find lower fares between WAS-FLL/MIA than LAX-BWI. Use FLL/MIA as your starting point and that will allow you to do BNE-(LAX/SFO)-WAS in J for just under 25K.

You might find the long transcon more comfortable in domestic J than anything offered by WN, and you might even save a buck or two.

Thanks LRD for the Qantas tool. It has proven quite valuable. I called AAdvantage today and started my bookings now that the 300 days from the end of my trip falls within the 14 day hold period. THe lady that helped me was quite nice, and it was good to have access to flights so when she said "nothing direct sir, would you like to try different dates?" I could either say no, how about this routing, or yes, there is direct availability the next day...

Not too shabby so far! Hopefully the LAN flights will all have the new Executive Business Class by next summer!

Nice going, congrats!

About LAN's new J: ok, so the new IFE is good and the seat reclines a lot more, but when flying solo I prefer LAN's old J. To me the new seat is too narrow, too hard and too close to the pax next to you.

Could this opinion differ based on who is seated next to you?

Fortunately, I've never flown Bus, so it'll seem nice to me! Anything'll be better than DFW-NRT in Y (which I've done)!

Ok, I've got my AKL-SYD now...getting there. As a side note, I can now see what many people on the AA board say about Qantas availability. For my flights home on the 25th of August there is nothing on Qantas directly over the pond. It looks like I'll have to do BNE-CNS-HKG-LAX-ORD-WAS (Departing on the 25th and arriving on the 26th), because to do it all the same day would require a 7:30am (or so) departure from SYD and there's no way to get there at that hour from BNE, and my trip is at like 24,960 miles so I can't go down the night before. (Either that or I have to suck it up and do coach either across the pond or BNE-HKG.

Can't book the final flight(s) until the 29th of this month...we'll see what I manage to come up with.

For my intra-Australia flights availability is pretty wide-open.

Phew....Game over! I am now ticketed. Only $184 worth of taxes, plus the $15 phone booking fee. I will be on AA, Lan Chile, Qantas, and Cathay Pacific. I'm looking forward to my first Business Class Experience and getting to compare the Bus. Class offerings of the three Int'l carriers I am going to experience!

A few items of note:
1) AA, why is there a $15 booking fee for phone bookings that you cannot do online? If I could have done it online I would have, especially considering the trouble AAgents had in figuring out what I was asking for (see item 2).
2) AA needs to train its Int'l AAdvantage Agents better. Many didn't know what a OneWorld award was and would transfer me to the OneWorld desk, which would just transfer me back to AAdvantage (and AAround and AAround we go....). Often agents couldn't find the flights (if it wasn't for Qantas' award engine I would have been SOL a couple of times).
3) A compliment. Laura an AAdvantage agent, the last one I spoke to, was VERY knowledgeable and got everything I needed taken care of. She was a joy!
4) On my itinerary at aa.com it lists everything as Business Class (except for one leg where only coach is flown), but on my ticket, all of my Qantas segments - except for the economy segment - are listed as Discount for the class of service. What does this mean?

Thanks again for all of your help.

Congratulations!

Because they can. This is a common complaint. It seems unfair to me, too.

Always remember the Flyertalk rule: Hang up immediately and try again if you reach an agent who doesn't know his or her stuff.

What did you finally book for start/end points? Did you manage to get back to DC?