Originally Posted by vedette
This appears on the Oneworld website:
"You are allowed to take two stopovers in total within your continent of origin in order to get to or from a gateway to begin or return from your international travel."
My departure city will be Madrid, and will need to go to LHR for a flight to DEL.
If I go straight to London, can I then take a two- or three-segment trip out prior to departing for Delhi? That seems to be the implication from PhilH's post below.
Or could I take a side trip first, such as to Malaga, then Barcelona and then to London?
Also, if my departure city is going to be Madrid, do I have to buy my ticket through a Spanish agency? I live in the US.
Thanks for any clarification.
If I understand your plans, you intend to first travel from your home in the U.S. to Spain, using another ticket not related to your around-the-world trip, then obtain a One-World-Explorer ticket in Spain, and fly around the world beginning and ending in Spain.
That's a reasonable thing to do because tickets for essentially the same journey are priced differently depending on where you begin and end it, and the U.S. not surprisingly is an expensive place to begin. Of course you have to figure in the value of getting from the U.S. to and from your rtw starting point.
Note that you are contractually obligated to end your trip where you began it (with, in a few cases, a little flexibility for alternate ending points). There is occasional discussion here about the consequences of violating that contract. If you don't finish your trip to the starting country, the consortium is entitled to charge you full fare for the segments you actually flew, a sum that will be truly staggering, but while there is no known record of that penalty being extracted, those of us who live cautious lives don't tempt fate.
The other advantage of starting an around the world trip outside your home region, especially if it's he U.S., is of course the subject of your original question. If you begin in Spain, when you get back to North America you'll not yet be finished with your trip. You'll be allowed to fly up to 8 segments within North and Central America (subject to a total maximum of 20 segments for your whole trip) at your leisure, during the one-year validity of the ticket. And you'll also be left with the transatlantic segment (assuming you flew east) plus anything you have left in Europe.
Again to address your question - if Europe is your continent of origination, you may fly four segments total there, and include no more than two stopovers. If you stay in a city for 24 hours or more, it's a stopover. The segment that takes you from Europe to your next continent, say Asia, doesn't count against the 4-segment limit, nor does the return to Europe at the end of the trip. If you begin in MAD, remember that at the end of your (eastbound, for example) trip you'll need to either have to fly IB from NA to Spain, or save a European segment so that you can get back from BA's (for example) hub to Spain.