YQ/YR is filed and adjustable, so it’s not random. At any given time, some carriers will be materially lower than others. If you know where the lower surcharges sit for a given segment (a travel agent could be useful for that), you can steer the AA RTW desk to use those—rates will then reprice accordingly.

In practice, the AA RTW agents are just inputting what you feed them, so you need to do the homework.

Also, AA e-ticket receipts are, as usual, borderline useless for understanding what’s actually going on. I typically pull the fare construction from CX, MH, etc.—their displays make it much easier to see how the numbers are being built across different combinations.Also, wanter to share a datapoint from an AA RTW ex-CPT.

Pulled YQ/YR off ITA per segment (operating carrier). Sum came to ~$2.5k across ~16 segments.

Actual ticketed YQ/YR: ~$826.

So: ITA segment YQ ≠ what RTW prices. Not even close.

What I’m seeing:

• AA metal → $0 YQ (as expected)
• BA short-haul → negligible
• CX intra-Asia → moderate but contained
• QR long-haul + QR-heavy clusters → main drivers

Conclusion: RTW pricing is clearly using constructed YQ, not summing filed surcharges. The dominant carrier on long-haul components seems to matter far more than individual segment values.

Also explains why QR-heavy routings price materially higher even when ITA totals look similar.

Takeaway: don’t try to add up YQ in ITA for RTWs — it will overstate by a lot.

Curious if anyone has a cleaner way to map filed YQ to RTW outputs, or if this is just black-box “rates desk magic.”