Originally Posted by
Gardyloo
The countries listed (Egypt, Morocco et al) are there because they're either on the African continent or traditionally regarded as central/western Asia (ex-USSR countries). Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states are all treated as Europe. Iran comprises the first "Asian" country one encounters heading east.
This seems blindingly obvious in hindsight, sorry for being dense.
Originally Posted by
Gardyloo
The quote from the OW website has been goofed up and is not reflective of the rules. You're allowed a max of 2 stopovers in the continent of origin, full stop. You can make one of those stopovers within the country of origin before departing internationally, and/or one after arriving internationally at the end of the trip, e.g. for trips starting in the US you could fly LAX-oJFK-LHR... and/or ...NRT-oORD-JFK at the end, but not LAX-oJFK-oMIA-LHR on the way out. (Hope that makes sense.) I'd recommend ignoring the bumph on the website and just download (and print) the PDF file with the official rules.
Great, thanks.
Originally Posted by
Gardyloo
Stopping in both NCE and ARN would be difficult (but not impossible) because both require transfers someplace (e.g. LHR) and you'd run out of segments in Europe. If you decide to start in someplace like Cairo, I'd probably recommend hitting Nice or Sweden before you start the trip, i.e. en route to wherever your origin point is.
Good points. I tried to work in both NCE and ARN, but ran out of total sectors (and we'd have to buy extra sectors for Europe and North America).
One difficulty is that I'd like to also use miles for my partner, which is always hard -- in addition to the flight availability problem (even booking as far out as possible) there are additional restrictions on connecting through the same city.