Hello everyone,

I wonder if I can impose on your collective experience. I've not booked an RTW fare before but two upcoming business trips and a family issue have me strongly considering it.

My two business trips are:

1. GVA-PEK-NGB-PEK-GVA April 23 outbound April 28 return

2. GVA-JFK-GVA May 2 outbound May 3 return

The family issue is my elderly father has been dealing with a complex hospitalization involving his wife in Vancouver for some time now. I am considering joining the above two trips to allow me to spend a few days with him (and his wife). If I do so I pay the additional cost over what the two trips would cost (4,300 Swiss francs), so I'm keen to keep the price as low as possible whilst still flying OneWorld carriers in business.

The requirements of my trip would be:

GVA-PEK (dep April 23)
PEK-NGB (dep April 25)
NGB-YVR (dep April 27 or 28)
YVR-JFK (dep May 1)
JFK-GVA (dep May 3)

I expect the PEK-NGB travel might best be considered surface since it takes me 2 hops to get there with OW and I will be with colleagues taking the 1435h Air China PEK-NGB flight. I've checked the OW routing and I would need to leave our meetings one hour earlier to make a PEK-HKG-NGB connection.

I tried configuring an itinerary using the OW online tool but this fails, telling me I have insufficient connection times in HEL, HKG, and LHR despite connection times of over 3 hours on each occasion. I contacted the BA RTW email who gave me a quote for the itinerary of about 9,500 Swiss francs. Since this well over twice the cost of the two trips booked separately it is a non-starter, which is of course disappointing to me given that part of me would like to see my dad and do what I can to help out.

Any thoughts on how I might find a RTW fare with OW carriers in business for the above with a cost closer to 5,000 Swiss francs would be very welcome.