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Old Mar 27, 2014 | 7:53 am
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Gardyloo
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Originally Posted by pye1201
When I book the itinerary, I ring the AA desk and have the bookings done over the phone, then I have to find a travel agent in Cairo who will take payment via credit card over the phone?
Emeco Travel in Cairo has been AA's GSA (general sales agent) for some time, and a number of RTWers have had xONExs issued through their services. http://www.emeco.com/index.php There are phone and email contacts listed on their site. Often a (Skype or similar) phone call helps get things started, rather than a blind email.

Originally Posted by pye1201
I've been working on the following itinerary: CAI-TYO-SYD-NOU-SYD-WLG-SYD-JFK-YVR-MEX-ORD-LHR-CDG-AMM and just can't get a pricing.
The online booking tool lets you put in destinations that require a plane change, but sometimes that causes it to seize up (along with its general perversity, the time of day, the wind direction, the tides and phase of the moon, apparently.)
In addition, it balks when Royal Jordanian or Qatar are the first carriers, and when you end in a different Middle East country than the one where you originate. Although the rules explicitly state this can be done at no charge, for some reason (the answer, of course, is lousy programming) the tool imposes the price from the ending country rather than the originating one. Thus if you start in Cairo and end in Amman, you'll get the higher Jordanian price for the whole trip. Seriously annoying; the work-around is either to have a human do the booking, such as the RTW desk or Mindpearl (South Africa) Tal (Israel) or hopefully Emeco, OR to show the trip ending in Cairo and then just re-issue the ticket later, changing back to Amman - US$125. Try CAI-LHR-NRT-SYD-NOU-SYD-WLG-SYD-JFK-YVR-DFW-MEX-ORD-LHR-CDG-AMM-CAI in the tool and see what happens. Having BA as the first carrier (CAI-LHR) will trigger huge BA fuel surcharges for the whole ticket, so you might ask whatever human you use to ticket via DOH or AMM as the first segment (i.e. CAI-DOH-NRT...) to avoid this, something the online tool can't handle.

Last edited by Gardyloo; Mar 27, 2014 at 8:12 am
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