I called the AA RTW desk on Thursday. It took all of five minutes to set up a 16 segment ex-ICN DONE4 for two. I told them I would ticket in Canada. Called back on Friday morning to get the pricing from Dublin. All OK, so I hopped in the car and paid for the ticket in Montreal (I live in New Hampshire) on the same day.

ICN-HKG-ADL-MEL,HBA-SYD-SFO-BOS-DFW-SLC-DFW-BOS-LHR-FCO-LHR-HKG-ICN with a couple of long breaks in the US

cost: $5,828 CA + tax $735 CA, in US$ $4,485 + $566

some notes:

I had to provide dummy dates to get an e-ticket; open-dated tickets have to be paper.

I used a U.S. credit card.

I booked the trans-pacific on Qantas as an AA codeshare. This allows me to fly BA over the Atlantic. (I think one of the two had to be on AA.

Although I am BAEC Gold, I arranged the RTW through AA because the taxes and fuel surcharges are lower.

The taxes and surcharges can be a real deal breaker. I also booked the positioning flight JFK-ICN in J on Cathay using 50,000 BA miles & only $158 taxes. For a separate trip I booked BOS-CDG round-trip on BA using BA miles (half-off sale) and the taxes and fuel surcharges were $720! Ouch!

Also, the ability to book a one-way using BA miles to get to ICN simplifies matters when the return date is more than 350 days in the future (particularly for non-golds who have to pay to change dates).