Dear FT gurus,

My very first post here so please be gentle

Got a conundrum which I was hoping you guys could offer some advice on ...

I'm planning a sabbatical with my wife - 9 month to 1 year RTW to start in Sept this year and was initially planning to redeem 2 J class Star Alliance RTW tickets with Singapore Airlines Krisflyer (where my miles are).

I foolishly assumed that the ticket conditions would be similar to the ones set out on the Star Alliance website, I had not figured on SQ having their own rules for the tickets.

Initial routing plan: SINGAPORE - CAPE TOWN- JOBURG - SAO PAULO - RIO DE JANEIRO - BUENOS AIRES - SANTIAGO -by land-LIMA - HONOLULU - TOKYO -FUKUOKA - TAIPEI - SINGAPORE

To summarize the differences:
*A RTW: 15 stops
SQ *A RTW: 7 stops

*A RTW: 1 year validity
SQ *A RTW: 6 month validity

*A RTW: dates changeable free along the way, routing changeable for a fee
SQ *A RTW: absolutely no change after flying out on first sector

This has put a spanner in the works for me ... especially the inflexibility of the ticket (no changes to dates) and the 6 month validity.

At the moment, my options are:
1. Buy the RTW tickets in cash (max flexibility but huge hit to my budget)

2. Redeem RTW ticket from SQ and plan such that we do most of our travel in the before the first 6 months before ending up at Japan perhaps 5+ months into the trip and forgo the rest of the RTW ticket back to Singapore. Spend the rest of the time in Japan and buy a ticket back to Singapore.

3. Condense the entire trip to 6 months (undesirable)

4. Anything I haven't considered due to lack of knowledge.

At the moment the mileage requirements for SQ RTW are:
180K Economy
240K Business
360K First

I have about 485K miles in Krisflyer, which means I can afford 2 J class RTWs, but they mentioned they might be revising the mileage requirements very soon, in which case they will probably go up (do they ever go down?) and I will be able to afford only 2 Y RTWs.

I think I can condense the trip down to 7 stops, no problem, some of the sectors can be by land (eg. SAO - RIO, TYO - FUK) Can you guys offer any advice? What would you do and why?

Thanks a million!!!!!!!

Adrian