Hey, Rex, good to see your name in print again, or I should say pixels.

The following is seriously long-winded; apologies.

In the strange world of RTW products, “cheap” cities for start/end points come and go. Sometimes an origin point will “slip beneath the radar” on the part of whoever in the alliances sets prices, resulting in fares that boggle the mind – not quite “mistake” fares like the business class round trip we got from the US to Cyprus for $80 or some such a few years ago, but low enough to make people do some crazy &%$#. For example a couple of years ago the robots at Oneworld offered first class RTWs for under US$5000 provided you started in the Sudan, not at the top of too many people’s bucket lists at the time.

In your case, Korea had its day around 4 years ago, when the Won was super weak against a big bucket of currencies. Business-class RTW tickets were a great deal for a few months, until all the alliances realized that their old pricing for RTW products (which is almost always denominated in local currency) was out of whack. They promptly raised prices until now Korea is no bargain at all in Asia for RTW tickets issued by any alliance.

Israel and Jordan have been traditionally among the cheaper origin points in Europe/Middle East, particularly with Oneworld (much less dramatic with the other alliances) but that distinction has moved across the Sinai to Egypt for the time being.

With the current strength of the USD, the current leaders for “cheap” (of course that’s a relative term) for business-class RTWs paid for in dollars are South Africa, Egypt and… Japan. Here’s where we come back to your plans.

A Oneworld 3-continent Oneworld Explorer bought and started/ended in Japan has a base price of $5417 today. The comparable (and I don’t think they really are) 29,000-mile Skyteam and Star Alliance business class RTWs bought and started in Japan are $5878 and $5588 respectively. The same tickets bought and started in Korea are $7650, $8158 and $7950 respectively, so over $2000 more than an hour’s flight away.

I have to emphasize again that these are all BASE PRICES. By the time you add government-imposed taxes and fees, but especially by the time you add various fuel surcharges (which all now go by a different name since a couple of mega lawsuits have been filed contesting whether they’re fuel related at all) the final price is usually anywhere from 10% to 20% higher.

So let’s talk about your plan/dilemma.

Let’s take your destination wish list and see what we could do with the three alliances’ RTW offerings assuming you started an RTW in Japan. To refresh, your list included Taipei, Hong Kong, Delhi, Moscow, Istanbul, Athens, Amsterdam, Rome, Casablanca, Paris and Louisville. I've only included some of these, but it doesn't really detract from the message.

Skyteam - HND-TPE-HKG-PVG-DEL-SVO-IST-FCO-CMN-CDG-ATL-SDF-ATL-NRT. This comes to around 24,500 flown miles, well under the 29,000 mile tier for Skyteam’s 29K mile RTW, so you could add up to three segments and/or 4500 more miles to the trip should you choose. There are two glitches: (1) you’d have to travel from Hong Kong to Delhi via Shanghai, as no Skyteam member flies that route directly and (2) Air France doesn’t have business class between Casablanca (CMN) and Paris, so you’d be in coach on that segment.

(A note on Casablanca - round trips between most western European cities and CMN are very cheap - $200 or less in economy, tolerable for a short flight. So using RTW tickets with a value of $300-$500 per segment is - IMO - not the best use of those segments, when the same $500 could get you in business class from Paris to Moscow, or Hong Kong to Amsterdam.)

Star Alliance - NRT-TPE-HKG-DEL-DME-VKO-IST-FCO-LIS-CMN-LIS-ORY-CDG-EWR-SDF-ORD-NRT. This is only 22,600 miles, but because of two cross-town airport changes (Moscow VKO to DME and Paris ORY-CDG) that each require “burning” one of the maximum of 16 segments, you have plenty of mileage cap but no remaining flight segments.

Oneworld - NRT-HKG-DEL-HKG-DME-MAD-CMN-MAD-FCO-ORD-SDF-DFW-ANC-DFW-SDF-ORD-NRT. While Oneworld doesn’t place any mileage restrictions on your route, it limits the number of segments you can fly in any one continent to four (except six in North America.) Combined with Oneworld not having too many partners in Europe, this limits the number of places you could visit within Europe (remember, “Europe” includes the Middle East and parts of North Africa). In the above case, I’ve dropped Istanbul and Paris, with the justification that you could include them as separate side trips at low cost from stopover points like Madrid or Rome. On the other hand, Oneworld’s allowance for six North America segments would allow you to include a whole separate trip within North America at no additional cost, in this case a trip to Alaska. (But it could be to California, Canada, the Caribbean, Central America or whatever.)

Any of these trips could be done in reverse as well – start in Asia, then come home for a breather, head off to Europe later, then end up back in Asia.

Or, at a base price around $1000 more than a three-continent Oneworld ticket, you could include New Zealand, with a routing something like this - NRT-HKG-SYD-AKL-SYD-DFW-SDF-DFW-YVR-JFK-MIA-SDF,MIA-MAD-DME-DOH-NRT.

Note these are all imaginary and could be modified to substitute your choice of destinations, provided the routing is compliant with the rules of the ticket product, and you don't exceed the mileage or continent/segment limitations. The main thing to remember is you have to cross the Atlantic and Pacific in the same direction, and you have to limit your flight segments (including land portions) to 16, all done within a year.

With respect to your already-bought tickets to Taiwan, assuming these are on Skyteam carriers (I assume Delta since you could upgrade) you could do one of the following: (1) Pay whatever change fees necessary to change the tickets to Tokyo instead of TPE, and change the return date while you’re at it, then just include TPE as one of the stops on the RTW ticket; or (2) change the return date on the TPE tickets and just buy a conventional ticket (or use miles) to pay for a TPE-TYO round trip – fly to Taiwan as planned, but then fly on your own to Tokyo, start the RTW, then when the RTW is done, fly back to TPE and use the return portion of the ticket. Or, (3) turn the existing round trip into an open-jaw, with the return from Tokyo instead of TPE, then just buy a one-way ticket from TPE to Tokyo.

You don’t need to stop in Japan at all; you can get off the plane from the US or from TPE, then just fly out of the airport on the first leg of the RTW the same day. (Of course I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that, but it’s possible. The RTW tickets are issued as e-tickets so you just show up and fly to start them.)

I like to suggest that people considering RTW trips put them in a context of a multi-year travel “master plan” that includes places you have to go as well as places you’d like to go, and also to use RTWs as a means of leveraging other travel.

For example, some years ago my wife and I fell in love (head over heels) with South Africa. Well as it happens South Africa is at present the cheapest origination point for Oneworld business-class RTW tickets. So in our strategic planning, we knew we had a certain amount of domestic (US) travel that we typically did every year, and we also had family and friends in various parts of the world that we liked to see from time to time – mainly in Europe and Israel. We wanted to visit Australia and New Zealand, more of Africa, and South America.

What we found was that business-class RTWs, in addition to being fairly inexpensive ways of flying long distances comfortably, also were a means of harvesting a whole lot of frequent flyer miles. One quickly attained elite status with one’s airline (in our case AA) which also led to major “bonus” redeemable miles, in addition to bonuses earned by flying in business or first class. Since the Oneworld Explorer doesn’t have a mileage limit, we found that one of our “typical” RTWs generated something like 100,000 to 120,000 frequent flyer miles for our accounts. So we developed a “strategic” plan that involved buying a Oneworld RTW in South Africa in year one, using that ticket for most if not all our travel needs over the next 12 months, then using the miles we’d earned over the next year, then repeating the process. So an investment of roughly $6000 in an RTW ticket gave us something like 20 or 22 business- or first class flights over two years (16 from the RTW, 4-6 as awards). That works out to $275-$300 per premium cabin flight – okay for SEA-ORD, pretty tremendous for JFK-HKG or SYD-JNB.

This is not for everyone, but my point is that these are very powerful travel tools, and they merit some serious premeditation for people who like to travel.