Originally Posted by
Adam Hoffmann
Hello All!
I am about 10 months away from retiring from the Army and am hoping to use my points on a well-deserved "victory lap" with my wife using the ANA RTW ticket. While we would love to do first class, for availability reasons I plan on not even trying that and will "settle" for business class.
I have 2 questions I was hoping for help with:
1. I'm wondering about the best tools to use to find availability. I originally used flightconnections and StarAlliance RTW planner to try and find the most likely hubs to use. We plan on using these 5 or 6 hubs as spokes to explore with cash or other award flights.. But as for finding availability, obviously I could use ANA's portal, BUT...I'm wondering if anyone thinks paying for point.me or expertflyer would be worth the money to save time and improve my ability to dial in a good trip without having to work out all the changes with a phone agent.
2. Timing...We hope to squeeze this between our youngest's HS graduation (early June '23) and her starting College (early-Sep '23). If Phileas Fogg could do it in 80, we should be able to do it in 90... If our last flight (probably a long haul over an ocean) takes off on 1 SEP 23, then am I correct in saying we can't try to book anything until 22AUG, when ANA's availability open up? And even so, that might not work if our last flight is on United or another partner that opens late?
Finally, not a question, BUT we hope to hit all 6 inhabited continents. We'd like to include Kenya (friend stationed there), Portugal (hoping to be expats there), and SE Asia. So any advice on throwing those into an itinerary would be appreciated and possibly lead me to buy you a drink if you can track me down in my nomadic life...
I truly appreciate everyone's time and any help, advice, or humor you can share!
Adam
Our itinerary from earlier in the thread for reference:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/34174746-post364.html
1. I used :
- the free version of FlightConnections (plus a list of *A partner airlines) to sketch out possible routes
- ExpertFlyer to gauge rough availability at release & how quickly it generally was snatched up (I didn't pay, using the free 5-day trial twice was enough)
- A combo of the ANA RT booking (which has +/-3 day view) and multi-city search to plan everything out in detail the last week before booking. When I dialed in to the phone agent, I didn't have to do anything more than feed dates & flight numbers (every leg I planned out the night before was available when I called first thing in the morning)
2.
This post from Reddit is the most detailed I've seen regarding exact schedule release/ticket availability
Plan to book your tickets 355 days out at 9AM Tokyo time. They will not release 355 days out at 9AM your local (non-Tokyo) time. Get to your computer a few minutes before to get set up.
Make sure you've selected Japan as the site country (top right of the homepage) and select English as the language. This will set the website timezone to Japan. This will enable you to see the desired date. If you're on the US site, you'll essentially be a day behind, and won't see the most recently available day.
I booked at 355 days out, with the last leg being ANA trans-pacific (NRT-SFO) and accepted that I would have to find my own way home from SFO-ATL. It's up to you whether you want to risk the availability of your other legs disappearing in the time it takes United to put up their flights. When I was looking, United didn't appear to make domestic first/business available at 330 for partners so if I would likely to be riding economy for that leg anyway, I'd rather lock in the RTW and pay separately to get home.
Our itinerary touches down in Portugal, Tanzania and Bali.
- US-Portugal is easy as TAP often release 6 J seats on transatlantic flights (EWR/IAD are probably easiest starting points but they fly from MIA as well)
- Your options getting to Kenya from Europe are:
- LH (very high fees for premium cabin)
- ET (their schedule releases at ~329 days so can be hard to fit into shorter itineraries like ours)
- MS (no one every has anything good to say about their product)
- TK (medium-ish fees, but usually long connections. ultimately what we chose)
- Then getting from Africa to Asia is the most difficult part.
- SQ doesn't release long haul J/F to partners
- AI has terrible reputation
- TG is only an option with a connection in Jeddah (which likely requires ET connecting flights)
- TK requires backtracking that will balloon the distance/miles cost
- Ultimately, we chose to book that part of our trip separately (JRO-DOH-DPS on QR via AA)