andymo99

Over the past ten months or so, I have been constructing a Skyteam Round-The-World (RTW) itinerary for two passengers in Business Class (heretofore, J). Since I am using my Delta Skymiles for this trip, I hope that this will be an acceptable home for a thread regarding my experience. There just doesn’t seem to be much traffic at the Skyteam forum, and so much of what I have to share concerns the reservation process that is unique to Delta Air Lines (DL). I am creating this thread to share what I have learned from this travel planning experience. Hopefully, this will be useful for others who might plan a similar trip in the future.

Trip Dates
Our travel will take place in the spring and summer of 2006. We plan to depart in mid-May and conclude the trip at the beginning of August (about 10 weeks of travel in total).

Rules of RTW Travel
In constructing a RTW award itinerary, there is a basic set of rules to be followed:

• All travel must be on Delta and its Skyteam partners (this means no use of Singapore, El Al, Virgin, etc. ). However, you are allowed to use Avianca and Alaska, as with all “multi-airline” awards
• You are permitted a maximum of 6 stopovers.
• You may have no more than 3 stopovers on any one continent.
• You may connect in a city for under 24 hours and it will not count toward your stopover total.
• You may not have more than 1 “voluntary” stopover in any city (however, you can use a city to connect on multiple occasions – as illustrated below)
• You must travel continuously in one direction, either from East to West, or from West to East
• You may, however, backtrack in order to make a connection (illustrated below).
• You may travel North/South as much as you wish.
• There is no maximum permitted mileage pertaining to this award (meaning that unlike with paid RTW tickets, there is no cap on the number of actual miles you can fly, subject to the other rules above).
• Finally, one of my favorite hints in this process enables you to really increase the value of your RTW ticket. It works as follows: You may expand the cities that you visit by separately purchasing what are called “surface sectors” between some of your stops. For example, you may fly ATL-LGW on your Skyteam Award. You can spend time in London and then fly on a separately purchased ticket (or take a train, etc. ) to Paris. Then you can spend time in Paris. The next leg of your RTW Award can be CDG-CAI. As far as Delta is concerned, your trip is ATL-LGW-surface-CDG-CAI. In this example, London and Paris combine together to count as only one of your 6 stopovers. By taking on the expense of getting from London to Paris on your own, you can really expand the number of stops on your trip. You’ll see on my itinerary (well below) that we pretty much doubled the number of destinations that we plan to visit by using this technique.

Additional Rules Affecting Our Itinerary
Certain Skyteam airlines (KE and AM) have blackout dates that must be observed in preparing the itinerary. The specific dates that we had to work around were:

• Can’t use KE flights that originate in the US from May 19 – June 30.
• Can’t use KE flights that originate anywhere else from July 20 – August 21
• Can’t use AM flights July 1 – August 17 (you can, however, use AM operated flights that are booked as DL codeshares!)
• Note that I am posting here only those blackout dates that were relevant in creating my itinerary. I created a new thread with a list of all 2006 and 2007 blackout dates affecting RTW awards.
• You can’t use codeshares of partners. By this, I mean that you can’t fly an AZ flight number (for example) that is actually operated by another carrier.
• On Business Class awards, you may not use CO flights that are marketed as “BusinessFirst. ” This includes all CO flights across the Atlantic and the Pacific. It also includes some, but not all, flights to South America. For example, EWR and IAH to Brazil (GIG and GRU) are “marketed” as BusinessFirst and thus ineligible for J awards. Flights to other destinations, such as LIM, are marketed simply as “Business” (although some use a BF cabin, including our chosen flight!). These flights are eligible for the J award. Delta’s phone representatives can help you figure out exactly which routes fall into which designation. However, be forewarned that not all are readily aware of the distinction, and you might have to educate some.

Due primarily to the KE blackout dates, we constructed our trip in a West to East fashion. I otherwise would have had a slight preference to travel in the reverse direction, but this was not too big a deal.

A Note on Ticketing Changes
Due to the lengthy duration of many RTW itineraries, many travelers will find themselves booking part of their travel before they can book the trip to completion. In this case, it will be necessary to create a “fake closure” to your itinerary. The trip must end in the same country in which it began. Later, as flights become available, you will need to update your itinerary properly. Each time you re-issue your ticket, you will incur a $50 fee per ticket. Concerning these ticketing changes, there is a way to make several changes, at different times, without incurring a $50 fee each time. Unlike the original reservation, there is no requirement to re-ticket within 14 days after making a change to a ticketed RTW reservation. So I could make many changes over the course of all of the months between now and my travel date, and then re-ticket one time, thus consolidating what would otherwise be multiple fees. The downside to this strategy is that you enjoy less protection on schedule changes before you have ticketed your new segments. For example, if you have a ticketed reservation on a segment that is later canceled, you will have far more leverage in being re-accommodated than if you had not yet ticketed the change.

How to Build The Trip
I offer two outstanding resources that were incredibly useful in planning our trip. First is the NWA Japan Award availability website. (I have linked the English version, but it might be based on my cookies; you should find English in a click or two if this shows up as Japanese on your computer.) This site is the best friend of anyone constructing a RTW itinerary on Skyteam. Simply plug in your city codes (I recommend that you break down your connections into step-by-step segments) and dates (be careful that you have chosen the correct year). You will need to specify how many seats you desire (hint: If you are looking for multiple seats without luck, try lowering the number to see what might be available). Finally, use the last drop down box to specify which airline you want to search. The option called “PerkSaver” will search NW and KL. Note that AZ is not offered in the menu. Nor is KE, although it was there some time ago when I was first planning our trip. On a side note, the award search feature at the CO website is also useful, although only for CO (and some NW) flights. However, the information is duplicated at the more comprehensive NW site. I should note that the availability information provided by the NW site is nearly identical to the availability that DL will be offering. However, there are occasions when the systems are not in line. These are very rare exceptions. By and large, you can expect the NW information to be highly accurate. The second very useful website resource is the Great Circle Mapper. Aside from drawing pretty maps of your itinerary, the Great Circle Mapper is very useful to help you plot points on your itinerary with corresponding longitude. This will help you ensure that each of your stops is in a continuous East to West or West to East direction. As a warning, the DL phone reps will very strictly enforce this rule. Remember, it is all right to backtrack to connect, but you can’t backtrack for a stopover.

One other helpful tool is the Skyteam website, which can help you find flight schedules.

The Value of this Award (and Why Not First Class?)
The redemption levels for this trip are as follows:
Coach: 140,000 miles
Business Class: 220,000 miles
First Class: 280,000

For a trip of this length, I wouldn’t consider coach travel. That would be a non-starter. We are too spoiled. I would actually be happy to spend 280K for First Class travel. However, this makes little sense because very few Skyteam airlines market routes with 3-class service. While many of the KE planes are physically set up with 3 classes, few are marketed as such (see other Flyertalk threads), and so you can only book into the Business Cabin, even if you are on a RTW F award. AF is converting many of its planes to 2 cabins, and is doing away with F awards for DL flyers. Also, F availability is much more difficult to find. One upside of a First Class award would be the freedom to book into CO’s BF cabin.

Overall, in our situation, Business Class made the most sense. I believe that the value of this award at this price is phenomenal. To illustrate this point, I added up the “a la carte” redemption values of each leg of our trip (really I had to halve the roundtrip values as one-ways are not permitted). For example, I count Europe to South Africa as costing 50,000 miles, since Delta offers this award roundtrip for 100,000 miles. When I did this for each leg of our itinerary, the “a la carte” award price in Business Class sums to 435,000 miles. Moreover, due to the maximum permitted mileage restriction of paid RTW tickets, my particular itinerary would not be permitted on a paid basis (by a long shot).

Making Reservations with Delta
The direct toll-free phone number to the “RTW Desk” is 1-888-496-6390. For some reason, most agents won’t give you this number, and most phone reps swear that a direct line does not exist. Use this number. It will save you time in getting to the agent you need. Only this desk can help you with this award. The only downside is that when you phone into this desk, since you skip the hoops of entering your Skymiles # and PIN, you don't come in "PIN-verified," and so some agents will go the extra step of confirming your identity.

This desk is staffed by professionals dedicated to RTW itineraries. They are located in SLC. This desk is not staffed 24 hours. Rather, they are open from 6a-11p Mountain Standard Time. As has been reported on this board before, the friendliness, knowledge, work ethic, and professionalism of this staff is “par excellence.” I should note that I experienced long hold times (sometimes very long) while calling this line during (summer) weeknight evenings. Hold times were shorter (occasionally no wait) during the workday. At present, I have very good luck in having little to no waiting time.

Our Itinerary
As my girlfriend and I mapped out what stops we would like to experience, we became very ambitious. We put together a wish list that included Buenos Aires, Rio, Germany, Croatia, South Africa, Botswana, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Australia, and New Zealand. Now the trick was to put some of our destinations into a trip that would obey all of the Award rules. The trickiest rules that restricted our decision making concerned the KE blackout dates (see above). Given our time window in which we plan to travel, this immediately indicated that we would need to fly from West to East. Also, KE was our only available service to and from Australia/New Zealand. So a few restrictions were in place. We would need to travel eastbound, and we’d need to be done with Australia/New Zealand by July 20. We came up with an itinerary as follows:
EWR-ATL-EZE (DL)
—surface segment—
GIG-CDG-TXL (AF)
—surface segment—
ZAG-PRG-AMS (OK)
Overnight in AMS < 24 hours
AMS-CPT (KL)
—surface segment—
JNB-CDG-BKK (AF) (includes a full day in CDG)
—surface segment—
SGN-ICN-SYD (KE) (includes a full day in ICN)
—surface segment—
AKL-ICN-NRT-LAX (KE)
Overnight in LAX < 24 hours
LAX-ATL-UIO-GYE (DL)
—surface segment—
LIM-EWR (CO)

In a perfect world, we would take NW for ICN-NRT-LAX, but two seats on NW TPAC are rarely available way ahead of time. It may open up a few days before travel, but we’ll plan on suffering through KE’s J class.

ZAG = Zagreb, Croatia
GYE = Guayaquil, Ecuador (launching area for Galapagos)
OK = CSA Czech Airlines

For most of the surface sectors, fairly inexpensive flights are available. We will stop at Iguaza Falls between EZE and GIG, so we’ve buy two flights to complete that surface. We are flying Germanwings, a discount airline, from Berlin to Split, Croatia (SPU) before driving on to ZAG to continue on our award. We’ll tour around South Africa including a flight between CPT and JNB. We’ll find a cheap flight between Thailand and Vietnam (likely on Air Asia). From GYE, we are taking a Galapagos cruise, which drops us in UIO at the end. From there, we are taking TACA through LIM to CUZ (Cuzco) to hike the Inca Trail, and then LAN Peru back to Lima. Ignoring all of the add-on flights, our route includes 57,678 of Business Class flying. Here is how the route looks mapped out.

I should mention that for awhile we were very stuck trying to figure out what our last stop would be. Due to the KE blackout dates, we needed to find a destination that was East of AKL and West of EWR. Considerations included Hawaii, ANC and Costa Rica, among other options. One interesting option would be to make the 6th stop PPT (Tahiti). This would actually be legal (and it was indeed available). However, while I would love to fly AKL-ICN-NRT-LAX-PPT, it was hard to justify to my girlfriend (an avid flier nonetheless) that we should fly 16,313 miles when the direct route from AKL-PPT would be only 2,544 miles. You can click here to see this triangle graphically. Plus, Tahiti would be a bit too expensive to add to this trip. So we “settled” on LIM, Macchu Pichu and the Galapagos.

Award Flight Availability
I can’t describe how shockingly easy it was to find award flights that met our needs, using the NWA Japan Award availability website. It definitely helped to be eyeing things 11 months ahead of time. However, I should mention that even as time went on, through 6 or 7 months in advance of our originating flights, many of our exact flights still had 2 J seats available. All of those that didn’t (with the exception of the flight out of Croatia) had a flight available within a few days. I should note that for our itinerary, the Croatia flights are tricky, because the only Skyteam service is a weekly OK (Czech) flight.

In fact, I was able to take advantage of this great availability to get a “pseudo” free extension of the 14 day hold. I first made the reservation when I could only reserve up until South Africa. This could be held for 14 days, but for itineraries involving Skyteam partners, Delta is now strict about requiring ticketing at the 14 day mark (see note at bottom). When the 14 days was about to lapse, I was able to create an entirely new reservation with the same flights, and so I could extend to a new final ending point, while earning myself another 14 days before ticketing was due. One should always keep this technique in mind. As this 14 day deadline neared, the same option was no longer available (because I couldn’t re-claim the flights out of Croatia), and so I extended the reservation as far as LAX and made my plans to ticket at the airport.

Ticketing Procedures
Early on in this reservation process, I had to authorize the mileage deduction so that the award certificates could be mailed to me so that I could bring them to the airport ticketing location. It was not permissible to just have the mileage deducted upon ticketing. Turning in certificates was required. It is important to note that I had to have the certificates mailed to me at the beginning of the 14-day hold to ensure that I would have them in time to bring them to the airport for ticketing. I think that this rule has subsequently been relaxed, and they now deduct miles without going through the certificate hassle.

When you are finally ready to go to the airport to ticket your reservation, you are advised to phone the RTW desk a day before your airport trip. This is to give them the opportunity to send your reservation to the pricing queue. Once in this queue, it should be priced by a specialist, who figures out what taxes and fees are to be charged. Also be advised that you should not request pricing more than 24 hours before you plan to ticket. This is because your taxes and fees will vary with currency fluctuations, and so pricing is only good for about 24 hours.

So the day before I was to ticket, I called to have my reservation put into the pricing queue. I advised the agent that I would ticket my reservation at BDL the following afternoon. When I arrived at BDL, I called the RTW Award desk to ensure that everything was in order before I got in line. I was very disappointed to learn that my reservation had not in fact been priced at that point, and I had to wait on the phone for about half an hour in order for the mess to be cleared up. This was a preventable occurrence, and I politely expressed to the phone rep my annoyance concerning this inconvenience. He sympathized, and agreed that I had done everything I was asked to do, and shouldn’t be inconvenienced in this manner. Finally, the tickets were priced and we were ready to go. The taxes and fees, only as far as LAX, totaled $202 per ticket.

I got in the ticketing line, which moved quickly. The agent at the desk was very nice, but it was clear that Hartford’s staff was very unfamiliar with issuing such award tickets! The process took a very long time, required the help of another experienced supervisor, and phone calls between the BDL agent and the RTW desk. At one point, the BDL agent was on my cell phone (after she got permission – evidently this is against the rules) with the RTW phone agents. After a very lengthy process, we were finally ready to do some heavy duty printing. I handed over my award certificates and my credit card and we finally seemed done. In case it is not obvious, the RTW desk requires the use of paper tickets for these awards. E-tickets would be so much simpler!

During my extensive time on the phone while at BDL, the courteous RTW desk representative informed me that due to their mistake in not having the ticket priced when they should have, I would be granted one waiver (per ticket) of the $50 change fee down the road. They knew that I would eventually be “changing” the tickets to add the closing segments, and so without my asking for any remuneration for their foul-up, they noted in my PNR that the first such change for each of us would have the fee waived. I thought that this was very fair, and unexpected.

Later that night, I logged on to delta.com. Imagine my astonishment (and horror!) when I saw another 440,000 miles deducted from my account! Egads! It was especially shocking because I had just deducted 440,000 miles for the two certificates a few weeks earlier, and so my account had plummeted 880K in just a few weeks. I quickly realized that mileage had somehow been deducted a second time, when I had ticketed at the airport. I did not panic, as I was confident that the situation would be rectified. The next day, I called Special Member Services and explained the situation. She was apologetic, but I could tell she was concerned about adding back 440,000 miles. I explained to her that the only potential issue for Delta would be if I never turned in the certificates, and was still holding them. I assured her that I was not so dishonest, and that if she phoned the ticketing desk at BDL, they would recall collecting the certificates. I was polite, but insistent, that the error should be quickly corrected. She seemed to believe me and said that she would take care of things and call me back. I credit her, for she did call my cell phone shortly thereafter to inform me that the miles had been redeposited, as was the case.

That BDL ticketing occurred in August 2005. Since that time, I have made numerous adjustments to the itineraries, including adding all of the legs after LAX (through S. America and back to EWR).

At one point, our routing was not quite identical for the two of us (due to award availability). As a result, our records had to be separated into two PNRs, which is a bit of an inconvenience. Our itineraries are now identical once again, but the two PNRs can not be merged into one record. They are, however, "cross-referenced" with one another in the notes sections.

Recently, I have tried to have the tickets re-issued at the airport. Recall that the paper tickets need to be re-issued before we travel. Unfortunately, this re-issue has proven to be a major hassle. First, I spent about 60 minutes working on this at BOS, with no luck. The DL systems can only print up to 15 segments (surface segments are included). We have over 15 segments to our itinerary (in fact, we have 22, including those surfacing segments, and not counting flights with "stops" as extra). This means that some of the sectors need to be "hand written." Anyhow, after nearly an hour working with the agents at BOS, we had to give up and go catch a flight. In the end, we got absolutely nowhere in all that time. A week later, we tried again at SLC. Same story. The agent couldn’t get things done in the time that we had. One of these days, I will go to PHL when I have a lot of time to spare. I will bring a folding chair and set up shop at the ticketing desk until they can get it done. I will call ahead and ask them when they want me to come in. I will do everything I can to make it easy for them and me. I’ll have to report back to let you know how that goes!


Note: I wrote most of this primer quite awhile ago, and a few things have changed since then. For example, it seems that DL will no longer hold partner seats for 14 days.

***Please suggest any changes that I should make to this post, and I will edit accordingly to keep it up to date.***

Traveller

Wow!! andymo99, congrats and thanks for posting this here.

GUWonder

Nice work. Thank you very much. ^^

vasantn

Great stuff, andymo99.

Are these the 1-800-flowers miles?

andymo99

Haha. It's hard to assign which miles go to which awards. I guess it depends on LIFO vs. FIFO accounting.

LostInAmerica

Informative, detailed, and helpful. Thanks for the taking the time and effort to post this. ^

vasantn

In any event, it's nice to see you posting frequently again.

andymo99

I appreciate that. A lot of travel kept me backlogged on FT for a long time. I have always kept up with all of the posts on the DL forum, but I fell behind starting on December 13, and didn't get fully caught up until April 13! At this point, I have read everything posted in here for years with the exception of the "Lounge" thread and the "Hot Sauce" thread. Also, I still need to catch up on 2/3 of the very long strike thread.

Unfortunately, my catch-up will be shortlived, as I am going to fall months behind again when I go RTW. Oh well. Small price to pay.

RSSrsvp

Andy, great post and in my top 10 list for FT!

One word of caution when booking a business class RTW ticket and flying on KE. On a few of their routes including ICN-DPS, they have a two class plane but the front cabin is something called Economy Plus. Economy Plus is either an F or C seat with only Y service from the FA's. They will not give you a seat in this cabin even if you were on a F RTW ticket, so you can forgetaboutit with a C award. The logic behind this is that none of the other Skyteam partners offer this class of service and therefore you will be given a Y seat.

I have reported this catch 22 on the 5 page RTW thread on the Skyteam board. This makes absolutely no sense to me, but a KE supervisor once told me that this class of service was not written into the agreement that all of the Skyteam members have for RTW ticketing and therefore they refuse to offer it to us.

Canarsie

andymo99, thank you for taking the time and effort to compile such an informative thread filled with valuable information.

You are truly an asset to the Delta forum.

Have a great time on your six-continent round-the-world journey, travel safely, and have fun!

obscure2k

Andy, this is really great. Am a veteran of 2 RTW's and I did all of the planning. As ours were paid trips and not terribly ambitious itineraries, it was fairly easy. What you have constructed is very impressive. Thanks for posting this extremely helpful information. This is the first print-worthy thread I think I have ever seen. ^

RobertS975

Great post, Andy! I am in Spain right now (Thank you for not striking, pilots.) and will digest the details when I return. I would love to do a RTW, but it would not be 50,000 + miles or 10 weeks. I am envious.

sbagdon

Amazing! This isn't a post, it's a roadmap in itself. Thanks for taking the time to edit such a complete (and amazing) bit of info!

Steve B.

NWA_5479

Wow! Thanks for this great resource. ^

That seems like a great value for 220K per person.

Now, remember to give us a trip report too!

andymo99

A trip report might be a long time coming!