brunos

I am a newbie to RTW tickets, so please be patient.
I noticed the RTW booking engine and it is helpful to build an itin.
How does it work if I book an pay online. Who is the actual issuer? Who should I contact for changes?
I will not depart from the country where I usually reside, so I am trying to optimize ease and reliability of managing the ticket after issuance.
Many thanks.

Himeno

I have had 3 xONEx's since the online tool became available. An LONE4 out of Australia, a DONE3 out of Japan and a DONE3 out of South Korea.

The LONE4 worked without an issue. At the time there were still a number of bugs in the tool which I used without a problem (they didn't notice one of them until long after it had been ticketed and they called to tell me about some schedule changes - which I had already known about). Issued by the AA office in BNE.

The first DONE3 had no major problems. The tool accepted the booking without issue, I found out about restrictions on my bank account, and how to get around them, via this booking which the bank had never told me about. This was when QF still handled ticketing for JL. QF NRT kept running into problems when they tried to charge my card, so they got QF SYD to call me. Some back and forth between my bank and QF, mixed in with a bunch of public holidays finally got it all sorted. Had a minor forex issue due to the time it took for QF to actually take the money.

The second DONE3 was more problematic. My first plan had been for CX to issue the ticket with a ICN-HKG-ORD routing, but AA then cancelled the following ORD-ANC flight before I could get everything sorted out with work and the trip booked. So I had to reroute as ICN-NRT-DFW, leading to AA ticketing for JL. At that point, the AA ticketing bug came up and I ended up having to book through the RTW desk and a Canadian travel agent.

Booking online via the tool works the same way as any other online transaction. In general, the marketing carrier of the first flight will be the ticket issuer. For some airlines (JL, RJ), another carrier (AA) tickets on their behalf (although this has been causing bugs and a failure on the last screen of the booking process). The airline who issued the ticket (before departing), or the carrier operating the next flight.

hrnt

We just booked a DONE4 for 3 pax. Here are a few observations:

The first carrier determines in most cases who tickets the trip, it seems. AA at least can sell the ticket online whereas BA requires that you buy the ticket from the local office. Buying such a ticket from the local office can be problematic, for example BA exJNB you could only pay the ticket at the airport or by doing an electronic fund transfer to BA's SA office.

The actual ticketing phase can be problematic: even though the flash app tells you that the itinerary is valid, it is possible that that you get an error message at last stage (when AA is ticketing, you get this error message only after entering credit card details). The error messages are useless, basically just "Error (9015)" andno useful info.

In theory you can play aroind with codeshares to get a different carrier to issue the ticket. In practice I couldn't get this to work. Even though the flash app accepted JNB-LHR-MAD with AA flight numbers, I never got such routing confirmed. A pity, because you can save around 1000eur per ticket by avoiding BA fuel surcharges.

Anyways, it all depends on the routing. I managed to get a LONE4 ticketed completely online a few years ago with no problems, but this time I ran into all sorts of problems. Good luck

ernestnywang

I am guessing that if you get your JNB-LHR connecting immediately to an AA-coded TATL segment and leave the Euro segments at the end (before goinf back to Africa) it should work.

Gardyloo

The online tool doesn't seem to like codeshare designations on the initial flight, but sometimes you don't discover that until the pay screens, which is very frustrating.

In practice, I've found that AA - through the RTW desk or through GSAs like Mindpearl in CPT - now passes through BA fuel surcharges regardless of the flight numbers or other attempts to avoid them. The only way to escape BA fuel fines is simply not to fly BA, nor have BA issue the ticket. From South Africa, that means leaving to the east, not north, and then figuring out some other way to return to Africa besides via London, which is very hard. Maybe AB to WDH at the end would reduce YQs, but who knows?