Mi13

Thanks Jerry -

That was exactly my suspicion - that I would not be able to upgrade a mileage ticket... but I wasn't sure how to even begin searching for that answer!

I'll definitely start looking at those links also.

agsoccer32

I was happy to see this thread created. I have spent a lot of time on flyer talk and learned a lot, but still feel like sometimes my questions are too newbie-ish to ask. I have a question about booking a one world ticket that I'll list below, but would also welcome suggestions from more seasoned fliers.

I am traveling to Australia in the mid-June time frame with possibly a few days in New Zealand. My home airport is JFK and my final destination would be Brisbane. What is the best way to book a trip like this using One World? Ideally I'd like to fly in business class. I have 132k AA miles and about 46k SPG points (i am aware of the 20k transfer to AA with the 5k bonus but haven't done it yet). So my question is how do I book this reward? I realize that using rewards to get to Australia can be a difficult booking, but i'm hoping that my flexibility will help to make this happen. Am I correct in understanding that i also have to use two partner airlines in addition to AA, such as Qantas and Cathay Pacific?

The second part of my question (and where the suggestions can come in) is that i'd like to be able to have a stop over/layover as part of my ticket so i can stop somewhere else on the return. I was thinking Tahiti or Fiji perhaps but I am open to suggestions from fliers who have made this trip before.

So in short, I'd like to start from JFK and go to Brisbane. After some time there i'd like to go to New Zealand and perhaps another location and then fly home. Is this doable with information/miles that I listed above? If this type of question has been repeated before or there is a clear explanation of this, I would appreciate a point in the right direction. Thank you so much

DownUnderFlyer

Nothing is too newbie and your questions are already quite advanced.
You have enough miles for a return ticket US-Australia in J (125k). I can give some general advice but as I am not too familiar with AAdvantage it might be better to ask the question in that forum since you want to use their miles.
One possibility to do this would be to fly JFK-LAX-AKL-BNE. I don't know the rules but most probably you can stopover in AKL so NZ would be sorted. However, in J any trans pacific awards are very hard to get. You might be flexible but you are late. At the moment, there is only on J seat in the entire month of June between LAX and AKL and that is on 13/6. So you need to be quick.
On the way back you could do BNE-NAN-LAX-JFK or maybe SYD-PPT-LAX-JFK and again do a stopover.

Unterwegs

Let me trow in a completely different idea for your trip of a lifetime. You need to see if that works for you.
On US air you are able to buy miles for a cost of around 1.5 cents per mile with their constant double miles promotions (likely too late now for the last, but in the past there always have been new ones coming).
A business class round trip costs less than 100.000 miles US-Asia. Cost in the 1500 $ range. You can make one stop on the way, and the stop can be in a gateway of any of the star carriers.There is a lot of discussion about this over in the US air forum. I am not an expert, but i believe you could do a YYC - xxx - BKK (destination) - CAI (stopover, Egyptair hub) - YYC mini RTW in business. Add an (fairly inexpensive) paid BKK-SYD and go to MNL and HAN of some of the asian low cost carriers. Add some low cost flying to the europen destinations (or make FRA your stopover point and go around in europe from there). You could add IPC/PPT as a RT ticket from SYD (likely to find good prices there).
Disadvantage: No date changes on the US air ticket after you left. And finding award space can be difficult, but you have a lot of possible connections, so this should be doable.

bjarmstr

Overwhelmed into silence. Just thought I would write and let you all know I appreciate your comments and I am just trying to assimilate them before I come back with some intelligent questions. In particular I am now worried about the lack of flexibility my ticket will give me. I was visualizing a plane with mostly economy seats and a few coveted first class seats, not me fighting for the 4 coveted L seats. How can I tell how many L seats on a plane? Can I have any L seat or are there (for example) only 4 L seats available for global explorer tickets on a given plane?
Thanks for all the great advice/ideas etc

jerry a. laska

This is the thread in the AA forum with the information on AA oneworld award tickets:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...er-awards.html

DownUnderFlyer

You can have any L seat not a special subcategory only. They issue might not be there at all, but on some flights things can get busy. SCL-IPC-PPT-AKL are examples where availability is tight. Having said this, there are plenty of seats at the moment.
The only way to tell is by using tools like KVS or Expertflyer. I am not sure whether the free sites still show L class. Or by calling the airline of course. But we had stories here where someone wanted to fly from SYD-HNL and QF didn't have a single L seat for over a month.

Dr. HFH

I don't have answers to all of your questions, and I see that you are already receiving some good input. Let me add just a bit where I can. (N.B. I have no experience with Global Explorer tickets, as I've never used one. I do, however, use a lot of One World Explorer tickets.)

Note that you can make date changes to a OneWorld Explorer ticket any time at no cost. There is a charge (USD$125 or $150) if you change the city sequence. Note, too, that on this ticket, an open segment will probably result in a paper ticket. (I actually prefer them, as I don't completely trust the ability of all One World carriers' computer systems to talk to each other, yet. There's nothing better than an old fashioned paper ticket with flight coupons to prove that you have a reservation and have paid the fare. In fact, if you buy a paper ticket from the AA agent in South Africa, Mindpearl, I think that you get one of the really old handwritten tickets with red carbon!!)


I, too, have faced the availability problem when booking OWE (One World Explorer) tickets. To start with, I do my planning using Expert Flyer. If you haven't seen it, take a look around the site. It's not terribly expensive, and worth every cent for complicated trip planning. After I use EF to plan the details of the itinerary, I book it on the phone with the AA RTW Desk (800-247-3247). They are incredibly nice, knowledgeable (for the most part) and helpful. If they can't get you precisely what you want, they nearly always can come up with a feasible workaround. Actually, I take, on average, four OWE tickets/year, and only book them on the phone with the RTW desk. I've never used the online tool.

bjarmstr

I am working through everyone's good ideas - thanks for taking the time to help us.

Vietnam Air is a Qantas Code share so HAN should work.

I thought I would try Gardyloo's suggestion and start in an alternate city. I chose LIM. Wow $4260 instead of $6199 (darn the price went up from yesterday). I can get to LIM for $1100 so this is looking promising. LIM-IPC-PPT-AKL-SYD-MNL-HKG-HAN-BKK-AMM-CAI-MAD-SAL-MIA-LIM 35828miles. This leaves me returning home at a fixed date/time (not as flexible) but I got SAL into the schedule! What if I ended my trip in MIA missing my MIA-LIM flight and my LIM-YYC flight, it sounded like this is frowned upon but do they keep track of this (impacting my future flights on these airlines?)? When I am ready to book this, I call American Airlines RTW desk to book? Then as I fly each segment I will get 1 AA mile for each mile flown? If I upgrade a ticket to business class I get 25% more miles per segment (but my ticket cost at least 50% more) -- yes I am trying hard to justify this upgrade but can't do it yet.

Unterwegs thoughts on buying reward miles and using these for the flight was a little beyond my comprehension but by my understanding this would leave me with a pretty inflexible ticket so I haven't dug farther into this. Although it does appear that getting 4 L tickets is going to cause some flexibility issues all on its own.

Before I book my ticket, I will try the expertflyer free trial to better see what seats are available. How far in advance should I purchase my ticket?

DownUnderFlyer

So are you sure there is a HAN-BKK QF coded flight?

Well you could also have an itinerary which takes you to YYC and the you missed the flights from there.
Missing flights means that the airline is entitled to price your flights at individual one way flights. However, we have do indication that any airline so far has ever done this. But this is at your own risk of course.

Yes.


No. You will get 100% on AA, IB or LA. But on QF or RJ you will only get 50%. So depending on your final routing Business Class gives you about double the miles. Also of course you get lounge access, priority bags, food, drinks and some sleep on long overnight flights. In fact, you might want to schedule some night flights to save hotel costs.

Gardyloo

Using the Great Circle Mapper, LIM-IPC-PPT-AKL-SYD-MNL-HKG-HAN-BKK-AMM-CAI-MAD-SAL-MIA-LIM comes in at 30,000+ miles, so you'd have sufficient miles to play around a little and still squeeze in under the 34,000 mile cap for the Global Explorer (if you want to keep Tahiti.)

However there is no valid service HAN-BKK; the rules only allow use of Vietnam Airlines when they carry a Qantas flight number; these are limited to e.g. Sydney - HCMC, not Hanoi, and not for flights not involving an origin or destination within Australia. Thus to get to HAN you'd have to make it a round-trip from HKG, and use 2 segments in the process.

I'm not sure HAN warrants using up two (valuable) flight segments out of 16. For example, a round trip from Bangkok to Hanoi is around $220 per person, or $110 per flight. At roughly $5000 for 16 flights, you're spending over $300 per segment as it is; it seems to me you'd be better off using those two Global Explorer segments for something with more bang per buck.

Such as...

Would you like to come home at some point in the trip - collect mail etc.?

Here's an alternate route that does that: LIM-IPC-PPT-AKL-SYD-MNL-HKG-BKK-AMM-CAI-MAD-LHR-YYC-DFW-SAL-MIA-LIM. It uses up 16 segments and stays within the 34K mile limit. (You'd do the Vietnam side trip during the BKK "stopover," then would fly on BA's nonstop to Calgary before finishing with SAL and LIM.

Regarding FF mileage earning, this has gotten somewhat more convoluted since AA, BA and IB have launched their new joint business venture. For someone in North America, I suspect the AA program would be your best bet; you should go to http://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/pa...n.jsp?from=Nav and look at the mileage-earning tables for the various partner airlines you'd be using. While "L" is a low booking category on some airlines (hence the availability issues mentioned earlier) it's not especially low on AA itself. With AA you'd earn 100% of miles in "L" using AA, BA and Lan, 50% on Qantas and Royal Jordanian, 30% on Iberia (except transatlantic flights to the USA or Puerto Rico, in which case 100%) and nothing on Cathay Pacific. I'm not sure how the QF sector on TN (PPT-AKL) would be counted - either 50% for the QF rate or nothing for the TN rate; my guess is nothing. So back-of-the-envelope it looks like you'd earn around 22K miles in L with the above route; more like 45K if you flew it in business class, due to cabin bonuses and the fact that the fractional mileage earning rates all go away with business class instead of "L" class.

One final thing - don't know your kids' ages, but don't forget that under-11s fly for 25% off the published prices - see the bottom section of the rules for both the Global and Oneworld Explorer.

bjarmstr

I think I understand the Code Share thing better now. I can't fly Vietnam Air unless it says Qantas on it (which strikes HAN from the schedule).
Knowing I will earn approx 22K in Economy and 45K in Business class is very helpful (unfortunately if I do the "start" in Peru-- business class is double the price!).
I liked the Great Circle Mapper, thanks for checking my miles (I accidentally added some of my segments in Kilometres!).
I tend to be a by the book kind of person so will work on a feasible plan for flying back home from Peru (Miami or Calgary will be my last resort escape clauses!)
My little one will be 75% of full fare but I imagine that since my older daughter turns 12 before we return, she will be full fare.

Here is my latest question. How do you make this work logistically?
My vision was booking a ticket next spring and being able to choose all the dates/times for the entire trip at that point. This appears to have 2 problems. 1) I need to be booking my RTW ticket soon so I can pick-up some seats across the south pacific in late Oct 2011. Any feel for how long can I wait on this as I still need to find some travel insurance with reasonable pre-existing condition clauses? 2) You can't book a plane ticket more than a year in advance, so I will have to leave my later flights open (and hope that something will work when the flights come up).
How do I pull off the ticket to Peru? Am I stuck with purchasing a 1-way ticket now and then hoping to find a one-way ticket at the end of the trip? Tickets don't appear to be available for purchase now for travel Sept 1, 2011 and a return of July, 2012 (and won't be until July 2011?).

I just keep learning new things -- what really great people you are, thanks for taking the time to help me.

Gardyloo

No, if she's 11 at the time of ticketing, she'll get the discount.

1. Prices go up once or twice a year; you'd be gambling a little to wait beyond a few weeks. We use www.insuremytrip.com when looking at trip insurance - you can evaluate numerous alternatives. Remember too that the RTW tickets carry somewhat less draconian cancellation clauses than other tickets - 10% of value penalty for economy tickets IIRC. On a year's exploration frankly the air tickets are not your biggest cost center/liability.

2. This is a common problem; the solution is to book all the dates to fit within the available window - i.e. use "dummy" dates, then change the dates as the 330-day "window" rolls along. The only time this is an issue is when routes are seasonal and the segment "doesn't exist" in the reservations systems. This doesn't appear to affect you; your routes are year-round.

For the Peru gambit, you're right in that two one-way tickets are usually much more than a round trip; however for round trips with 6 months or more elapsing between the outbound and return flights, the prices tend to be very close to the two one-ways. Right now, one-way tickets from YYC to LIM are in the $700 - $800 range (US).

What you might do in this case is to purchase AA miles, then redeem them for one-way award flights. AA requires 17,500 miles for a one-way award using any of their partners (e.g. Alaska Airlines to San Francisco, then Lan to Lima, or AA to Miami then Lima, etc.) You can buy 18,000 miles from aa.com for $450 - and through this month you get 33% bonus (so you'd get 24K miles for the same price). Then just turn around and redeem them for your chosen dates, or close to them. As a rule, economy awards to places like Lima are not terribly difficult to obtain; just stay away from holiday weekends etc. Then when you're done, you can redeem more miles for the trip home.

It's often a cheap way to do one-way trips when the published fares are very high. People doing one-way transatlantic cruises do this all the time.

soonerdiva

If we are booked in Business class from LGW to MAL on BA. What class seats does that equal...Club World Class or World Traveler Plus Class? Thanks!

Kiwi Flyer

Welcome to Flyer Talk soonerdiva

Business class on BA longhaul is called club world.
World Traveler Plus is premium economy.