re: USDM & AA account balances to convert from March 28th
Trying to decide to book now with USDM or wait til AA merge for a SYD-SGN J return. Advice needed.
I know AA will be only 70k vs 90k USDM, however for the outbound the only flight available for 2 pax in J is: SYD-PER-HKG-SGN. Will this be a valid routing on AA? it's not a typical commercial route.
Your proposed routing exceeds the MPM+25, so technically even if you were to try it on USDM you might be knocked back anyway.
If you really wanted to find out, then calling AA and getting them to cost up the routing can't hurt - just feed them the flights, cost it up and then tell them you'll think about it and thank them for their time. My guess is, however, that AA won't accept this as a single South Pacific - Asia 2 award.
Note that in many cases, AA won't tell you if you have an "invalid routing", because there almost aren't really such things, just some routings will cost more than one award.
For example, say I wanted to book one-way BNE-MEL-PER-HKG-JFK in J. Crazy? Actually it
just fits inside the MPM+25, would you believe it (the coughulative MPM calculation is a bit b0rked, though)... but this is not a direct routing and it doesn't qualify for a "free" third zone transit. If you called US DM to ticket this up, you may or may not have a chance (technically it should go) to book this. If you called AA up, they'll happily add the flights as you quote them, then they'll tell you the price as computed by the computer; if your routing happens to 'violate' some of the rules, then you'll know it because the price in miles they give you will be higher than you expected (cf. the "direct" cost).