Gardyloo told me about Oneworld Explorer in another sub-forum and I'm excited to plan a DONE3 because that will save me helluva lot of money than I otherwise would have to pay.

I spent the last few days reading in here but I still have some questions.

1. Booking: There are mentions of booking via airlines and travel agents but it seems you can also book via https://rtw.oneworld.com/rtw website? Are there any advantages to booking with airline or travel agent? Website seems much easier, so I must be missing something.

2. Ticketing Airline: There seems to be some significance attached to the ticketing airline, but I'm not quite sure why it matters. How does it come into play?

3. Availability: These are revenue tickets but there seems to be some concerns about availability at the associated fare classes. When playing on https://rtw.oneworld.com/rtw everything I selected appeared to have available flights. Or is that wrong assumption? Does OneWorld online tool not take availability into account but only when you buy it you learn about it?

4. Stretching trip out to full 12 months: Since you can only book 12 months in advance for any flight, you can only do stretch this out to full 12 months (or 11 to be more reasonable) if the origin flights are close to booking date, right? If I'm starting a trip in June, would I have any trouble (or availability issues) if I wait till April to book it? How early should I book?

5. Cheapest Origin: Current cheapest origins for DONE3 appears to be CAI or NRT. Or JNB for a DONE4. Are there others that I missed?

6. Origin stopover limits: I'm starting in NRT for best pricing and looks like I'm limited to 2 stopovers in Asia. Are there any tricks to get around that?