Originally Posted by upgrader
I'm contemplating a RTW award trip with my wife. I would begin and end in Orlando and our six stops would probably be in Tokyo, Sidney, Hong Kong/BKK, Delhi, Capetown and London. One issue is whether to fly Business or F. Given the upcoming reality of not being able to get F tickets on AF and the limited F classes now available on ST members, does anyone have a strong opinion that F would be worth it to these destinations? Or would I be wasting the extra 60K needed for F due to the fact that these routes are not likely to have many F opportunities? I am open to using all ST partners to accomplish the trip so I have flexibility that way. I know you would need more details of the trip to make a definitive choice but I was just wondering if anyone has any general thoughts on whether this would be worth an F award. Of course, I might not be able to arrange the trip given limited availabilty of awards but let's assume I can find availability to all these destinations. Would you spend the extra 60K to go F? Please be as specific as you can about ST members' equipment and routes that would warrant F if you believe I should go F. I'm open to strange and/or lengthy routings if that would get me true F class experiences. Thanks in advance for any advice and insights you can offer.
There isn't a lot of true F on the SkyTeam network. Assuming that you choose to fly Westbound, you are probably looking at CO or NW from MCO to TYO. I know that CO requires F to fly their BF seats. For my upcoming RTW that was enough to justify my paying the extra miles. Otherwise you are looking at flying via KE and connecting in Seoul. After TYO you would probably need to go back up to ICN and then down to SYD on KE. Or you could connect via GUM to CNS on CO/CS and find your way on a LCC down to SYD. I'm pretty sure that CO/CS offers a CNS-HKG one stop flight (via MNL). From there, getting to DEL is pretty difficult on SkyTeam. You'd pretty much have to fly KE (if they even serve DEL) and do it back up via ICN again. After DEL, you are looking at connecting somewhere in Europe to get to JNB which is again not too convenient. From there, JNB-LON could probably be on KL, AZ or AF.
In the end, not too many options in F, but to get the decent seats on the CO I know you need an F reward; not sure about NW. You may also want to reconsider your routing to take advantage of the cities that SkyTeam actually serves conveniently. My fiancee and I are having to replan our originally scheduled honeymoon routings to try to find reasonable connections on SkyTeam.