The ^ was because they were able to ok a route , send over detailed tax details within 30 minutes of that and have the tickets ready for issue 30 minutes later.

All offices should be able to do that whether it is a newly issued RTW or a re-routing - but sadly that is often not the case.

It's a shame that all offices don't have standardise responses to all possibilities on the RTW ticket as well - but I took the pragmatic approach - I needed the tickets issued bf 31 August (b/c of the price increase), I really did want to get out of CMB that night and although NRT-LHR is my prefered route, even if I took it - I would have re-routed immediately after - so I may as well re-route immediately before I take the inter-con route.

I will contact Cathay in HK this week and see if they ok a potential re-route
with the contested segment in place.