Originally Posted by
henry999
This is a bit confused and/or misleading. In the last six years, the AA RTW desk has happily booked three DONE4s for us with QR as the first flight (OSL-DOH) and we have never gone anywhere near South America.
AA RTW desk requires an intercontinental AA coded segment. So your choices are between Asia / Oceania & North America, Europe / ME & North America, or South America & North America.
The reason you see this come up so often is because people credting to AAdvantage want to avoid long haul AA segments due to the revenue credit basis penalty vs. distance on other codes. More recently people crediting to BA also want to avoid AA codes. For everyone else it often doesn't matter (I forget if IB matters or not, and for QR PC it's an advantage to have AA codes over QR codes)