FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Best way to book around the world award tickets on UA?
Old Dec 27, 2006, 3:26 pm
  #9  
vsevolod4
 
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Princeton, NJ; Lviv Ukraine
Programs: UA 3.6MM, AF/KL Lifetime Plat, BA Gold, AA 1MM, IC Spire RA, Kimpton IC, Marriott Plat, et alia
Posts: 2,732
35K ain't that bad!

35K ain't that bad for your "backbone" RTW ticket. If you fly around the world on the equator, that's about 24,900 miles. So 35K gives you an extra 10K worth of "deviations" from this routing.

But if you plan to travel for a full year, you may go beyond the 35K. In some cases, this will be for segments where *A does not have a good connection, so you'd be traveling on separate tixx anyway.

But what you may want to do is to look at the price of a cheap long-haul. For example if you find a good price for a DEN-HKG fare you could then save the 6000 or so miles, and use them up for various country-to-country trips that would likely add up to more $$$. Or you could redeem for the 35K RTW award, and additionally redeem for a trip to Asia to get you started.

It is a shame you don't have 600K miles, because that's where traveling Business instead of Coach is certainly worth the 50% extra miles. My suggestion is to run up the meter to 600K, perhaps by starting with paid tickets before you redeem for the RTW. Sounds like you have 6 months to get there :-)

Finally, another option you could do if you really want to do lots of travel is to redeem miles for an RTW award (if you can stretch your miles to 600K, in business), and then buy a SEPARATE, paid RTW (perhaps *A but perhaps ST or OW to give you more choices), that would give you an additional 29K miles. This would give you 64K total miles to use. Your coach RTW can be bought from *A, or you can look for bucket shops that sell it cheaper, and you should price it starting in Asia or starting in Europe, as that should affect the fare. Use your Busines RTW for your long-hauls where it matters, and use your 29K for the remainder.

I'm a big fan of RTWs but they do require you to have a good understanding of alliances, hubs, and the like. And reading the fine print. While the fine print seems daunting at first (minimum number, maximum number of stopovers, date changes vs. routing changes, no change on initial transatlantic/transpacific outbound, etc.), you get used to them. While there are a few blackout dates and you need to find inventory in certain fare classes (the list of which differs on EACH carrier), it's fairly easy once you get the hang of it, and you can make changes along the way. Problem with changes is that if you have a paper ticket (and you're likely to get sucked into a paper ticket if you include certain wacky countries on your itinerary), that you need to go to an airport or CTO and have it reissued (or restickered if it's only date changes), which is often a hassle.

When I go through periods of frenetic travel, I often buy more than one RTW ticket; example one on OW, one on *A that's eastbound, one on *A that's westbound and one on ST, starting on different continents ... and you keep these tickets open for a while (never take the final leg, so at any point, you have one active RTW where you're in Europe, another where you're in Asia, another where you're in the Americas. Requires a lot of keeping track of which itinerary you're on, but it's kind of like having an "airpass" for almost unlimited mileage, changeable, wherever you are.

Good luck with your planning ...
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