Originally Posted by
john c wisconsin
Sounds like you Got this! Great options. You are correct on the same country. Forgot about that. Terms listed below.
For Round the World itineraries, the required mileage is calculated according to the total basic sector mileage for the entire itinerary. (Calculations exclude ground transportation sectors.) Flights must be used to cross both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans once. The flight direction of the itinerary must be east-to-west or west-to-east. Backtracking is not permitted. Up to 8 stopovers are permitted between the departure point and the final return point. (Up to 3 stopovers are permitted within Europe and up to 4 stopovers are permitted within Japan.) The departure date of the final international flight to return to the country of departure must be at least 10 days after the departure of the first international flight on the itinerary.
You can book maximum of 12 flight segments and 4 ground transfer segments on one ticket. Transfers between airports in the same city also count as ground transfer segments.
Actually, I just realized an issue. Not with the itinerary itself, but with booking it.
The NRT/HND-JFK leg is by far the highest in-demand and lowest availability. This is for 2 people, and ANA flights can be booked 355 days out. 354 and 355 days out there is generally availability for 2, but before that it is quite unlikely. So I would definitely want to book that one at exactly 355 days out. With an ideal returning flight of 4/4/2021, that means I need to book it on 4/4/2020.
Obviously, I'm booking the entire trip at the same time. Working backwards from 4/4/2021 and how long we want to spend in each destination, here's the dates of the flights we'd be looking at vs how far in advance those airlines release availability.
Other than the 1st and last flight, basically every other flight in between has nearly 100% of days 10+ months out with 2 J-class seats available (great!). The issue is that:
-When I want to book an ADD-DEL flight for 3/19/2021, the Ethiopian Airlines flights will only be available through 3/10/2021, and I'll need to wait 9 days.
-Same for the DEL-BKK flight, but I'll need to wait 1 day
-Same for the BKK-SGN flight, but I'll need to wait 3 days
What I believe I've read is that once the itinerary is booked, you can change the dates on individual flights (ie. fly the same route with the same carrier on a different date) by calling in and paying the $25 phone booking fee, but any other changes require a cancellation of the entire rtw booking and then you have to rebook everything, which risks flights not going back into award inventory. As a result, you're supposed to do your initial booking with some "dummy dates" and then change them later. I just can't figure out how I'm supposed to do that in this case.
Starting with the latest flights and then working backwards:
-I can book the SGN-TPE-ICN-KIX+NRT-JFK section using their actual desired dates.
-The 3 flights with issues are in a row (ADD-DEL will be 9-days "short" of being available, DEL-BKK will be 1-day "short", BKK-SGN will be 3 days "short"):
-I could book the DEL-BKK and BKK-SGN flights using dates that are 3 days earlier than desired and then correct them later when Thai Airways likely releases the awards in 1 and 3 days.
-However, for the ADD-DEL segment, if I want to book that one I need to book it at least 9-days earlier than desired. If I do that, it would actually be earlier than the jfk-ist-ADD segments.
-I guess I could then book the entire first 5 legs (jfk-ist-ADD-DEL-BKK-SGN) of the trip for dates almost 2 weeks earlier than desired and correct them later (thus preserving the final NRT-jfk leg for which availability will certainly dry up)
-The ist-ADD-DEL-BKK-SGN segments would almost certainly have availability once their award calendar rolls over my desired dates.
-The JFK-IST one is the tricky one where I might run into issues...
Availability on JFK-IST is a bit sporadic. If I was booking JFK-IST today, I could obviously just improvise and pick an alternative flight (ie. BOS-IST), but in this case it seems like I might have to commit to JFK or BOS before I know what the availability will be like after I wait for Turkish calendar to release (or else I have to cancel and book the RTW itinerary again). The weird thing is that it doesn't seem like people are slowly snapping up JFK-IST flights, but rather that Turkish just seems to randomly release or not release J seats on certain dates. If that's true (which I could verify by taking an itinerary of # of seats available on various days and watching their trends over the next few weeks), then I guess I could potentially see what was available on my desired dates (even if I can't "lock it up" at the time of the RTW booking).
Am I thinking about this right?