Mama

If you are not sure about the return date, the one way award ticket is good.

simmang

Just another thought on this. A few months ago I booked a RT award for 50k miles, hoping the return would open up as saver eventually. I flew the first half of the ticket. While at the destination, I saw the $$ price of the return ticket was cheap and not worth blowing 25k miles on -- plus I could earn some PQDs, so I bought it. I thought I could simply cancel the return and refund the return segment miles as a 1K, but wrong. Since I had flown the outbound segment, the 25k miles were caught up in some purgatory and not refunded; I had to use the ticket at a later date to use those miles (a minor PITA).

Now (as a 1K) I just book one way award segments to minimize any issues with changes (provided I don't want any stopovers as allowed with RTs).

VNDream

I am in the same boat. I use to book RT award tickets until I needed to make changes and it was just difficult and time consuming. In addition, I found that looking for award tickets via the reservation system vs. making a change to an existing award ticket did not always provide the same award seat availability on the same flight segments! I asked a 1k UA rep about this and she said they should be the same, but they are never the same!

So for me, it is easier to book one ways because I like the flexibility to make changes on my own with little difficulty.