Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
Fly east to west, it is alot easier on your body (jet lag). I have flown about a dozen RTWs in the last several years and I will never do another one from west to east.
Yes, aside from catching the end of summer in Australia and giving ourselves more time for it to warm up, up north, this was a big reason why I want to go West to East. The jet lag will waste a week of my time if we go East!
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"Here is my ideal routing:
LAX-SYD (travel in Australia would be based on what fit our needs while there, either an airpass, some train or bus travel etc)"
Australia requires a visa, but it is an on-line application. QF files the route
Yes, visa is not a problem. Online, easy peasy.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"Australia to New Zealand"
No problem, again QF.
Yep!
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"Australia - Japan"
QF or JL
Been there, visa issued upon arrival with no problem before. Doubt there will be one now!
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"Japan- Bangkok, Thailand"
JL does it
Ding!
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"Thailand - China (need to check out visa requirements, mostly want to see the great wall and more of a tourist stop than anything)"
Need a visa and it takes several days, even with a visa service. Service via HKG on CX/KA
China is about 2 months away, so I have time.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"China (or Thailand) - Calcutta, India (same travel plans as above)"
India requires Visas as well. They take a few days to get using a service.
Again, two months away and the people in India who are taking care of me are very well positioned to be able to aid in whatever needs to be done.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"India - Isreal (relatively short trip, huge fan base there surprisingly enough!)'
Difficult to get from India to Israel. You would need to transit via western Europe. I do it a couple of times per year on a OW RTW and have to go via LHR.
I'm not against just flying to Europe on to the next part of our trip and then taking a flight over there since I just want to go for the weekend either.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
"Isreal - Europe (once we're in Europe we'll be touring in a Tour Bus)"
No problem there.
We'll be taking the bus and then parking it occasionally and taking flights like I said in the last post. We'll have the flexibility of being able to hit an airport when we need to without having to unload the whole bus and take it with us.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
You will also need to limit your RTW ticket to 16 legs. Open jaw segments count as a leg.
Use nested RT tickets to fill in the gaps.
That's what I was confused about. I was not aware that if a flight had a connection, that it took more than one segment, which is kind of crappy because if I'm going from A-B and I have o stop at C to get there but I'm not doing a stop over or anything else, I shouldn't have to waste a segment on it. Now that hat has been explained to me, I understand it. I also didn't realize this because I had no problem with the first simplified RTW tickets that I planned through oneworld's planner. I was able to choose all of the flights and went through the entire thing up until paying for it. Once I realized I had all of these extra segments, I was trying to make sure that I got my moneys worth but I didn't know that the connections cause it to be counted as a segment.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
RTW tickets limit the number of stops in each continent. I think you have too many stops in Asia, so you would need to book nested RT tickets for some of your stops.
Yes, I believe that it is 4 but for some reason I was thinking country in a continent not the continent itself.
It has been hard to explain where I want to go because when I list the cities/countries that I have in mind, some people take that as being the definitive route that I want to take and then tell me I'm crazy.
If I posted the full list of every city that we're going to, I'm sure I'd see some heads popping off their bodies.
Originally Posted by
PMMMDL
I think you are looking for trouble expecting to get this figured, booked, "visa"ed.... in 4 weeks. I could do it, but I have been through it a bunch of times so I know most of the rules and most of the pitfalls.
You call it trouble, I call it adventure!
My first country returns the visa in minutes online. Then the only other visas that I need are for China and India which those parts of the trip are more than 6 weeks away. I have plenty of time to get the visas.
Originally Posted by
henry999
It has been pretty clear from the beginning that the OP has some completely unrealistic expectations.
Experience, knowledge of the rules, etc. are all helpful in planning, of course; however, the fact remains that there is SFA you can do without the availability.
cheers,
Henry
Can you explain to me what's unrealistic about my "expectations"? I'm not even sure what you guys think my expectations are to begin with. I'm simply trying to purchase a bunch of plane tickets. If it ends up being too much of a pain in the ... to purchase a RTW ticket for myself and four other people, then I'll just purchase a string of multi-city or one way tickets.
You're right. I have absolutely zero experience or knowledge of the rules for RTW tickets. I doubt that many people do, which is why I came to the mecca of air travel that is flyertalk and asked a bunch of guys that I figured would have that knowledge and expertise so that they could share it with a girl like me who doesn't have it.
All that aside, I have earned almost 2 million AA miles (this trip will put me over the 2mm mark!), I'm EXP and have been for a couple years. I somehow managed to get blessed by the gods at AA last year when I only flew 75k miles and they gave me EXP again anyway. All this at 29 while I'm off flying around looking for trouble with my unrealistic expectations!
But seriously guys, thank you for your help.
What can I do to make it easier to help me? Would you like a list of all the countries that I want to go to? As I've said, I'm very flexible still with the exception of a couple time frames when I need to be in certain countries.
Originally Posted by
christep
Assuming you're trying to do this on a OneWorld Explorer ticket that isn't even close to valid.
There are no eligible direct flights on DRW-TYO, SHA-BKK, DEL-TLV, TLV-HEL, STO-OSL, ...
16 segments means 16 flights each with its own number. If you need two flights with two different numbers then that's two segments.
Are there any circumstances when there would be a connection where it did not require an additional segment?
So that means the key is getting as many direct flights as possible. I totally didn't get that this whole time and now I'm feeling pretty dumb!
As I said before, I had done a much smaller RTW ticket but it worked easily and told me everything was valid. I didn't realize it was using additional segments. I thought that I wasn't maximizing the trip because I wasn't using all the segments but it turns out that maybe I was.