Originally Posted by number_6
Thats an AONE5 -- hope you weren't relying on paying the AONE3 price! As for your other questions, BA flights in SA operated by Comair do qualify for the 4 BA segments. Surface segments do not count (yet -- maybe with the next rule change). Hard to book segments are those that have few seats per week, for example SCL-SYD used to be 15 seats/week in F (and mayb 3/wk in A), now it is up to 20 seats/week. Compare with JFK-LHR which has several thousand seats per week. LHR-CPT is very difficult seasonally (but LHR-JNB is much easier). As for unflown segments, technically that invalidates the RTW fare and the airline issuing the ticket can recompute at the point-to-point fare and charge you or your travel agent the difference (I worked it out once and the max possible charge is about USD 40,000). In practice it seems to be ignored, but who knows? Litigating the CoC in the jurisdiction where the fare was purchased isn't a particularly attractive option.
Thanks for the responses, number_6. Yes I meant an AONE4 (not Asia or So.Am) not AONE3- I have been trying to get charged in EGP rather than USD (which would have to be converted again to CAD) but have not been successful. Postings over the past 6 months seem to indicate that this is the current BA-CAI practice. Right?
My initial question about unflown segments had to do with the situation when you are under the segment limit and are likely to drive or train between XXX-YYY but whether you thow it into the itinerary as a flight just in case you change your mind and decide to fly it. In that case, if it is there and you decide not to fly it, can you just ignore it or does the ticket have to be rewritten (in which case it would be best to leave it out initially and add it later if necessary).
Then that led me to reflecting on some of the elaborate 4 or so nested trips (with two or more going in each direction) that I considered earlier in which it seemed desirable on occasion to end one segment in HKG, say, and pick up the next in LAX, say, because you would have gotten there on another ticket and didn't want to fly HKG-LAX on that ticket but wanted to pick it up later from LAX. At the time this seemed to make sense but I didn't work through all the implications-- and so my question was two-fold (a) whether the experienced nesters do this, and (b) whether it is accepted by the airlines.