Just following up on my experience, to the extent it’s helpful for others. We flew into Toronto on Saturday on a one-way United (operated by Air Canada) ticket, and attempted to ticket our DONE5 around 8 AM./*/ The one ticketing person who can handle this at the airport was absolutely great. She’s retiring soon, which is very unfortunate, because she was an absolute pleasure to work with.

Not as pleasant, however, was the fact that the ticket that I had been told would be rated by Saturday morning wasn’t (obviously not the ticketing agent’s fault), so we had to wait around for two more hours, until the AA RTW desk and/or rate department opened up. The ticket was 20 segments, with 15 flown segments, and was a printed paper ticket, which made the agent very happy, because she said it takes her around 2 hours to handwrite a single 20-segment ticket.

One thing I’ll just note, without going into all the gory details, is that if you want to buy a Visit South America Pass, and you’re flying into South America on a ticket other than your *ONE* (but out of South America on your *ONE*), make sure to give AA the ticket numbers for the flight on the other PNR (the one they can't see) so it can all be cross-referenced. Otherwise, you risk having your VSAPASS one day get voided out, which is what happened to us (this was all prior to ticketing the VSAPASS). We were able to get the original VSAPASS reservation reinstated, but it was a bit of a pain.

One question on taxes: My DONE reservation was initially CJC-xSCL-IPC-SCL//EZE-JFK//EWR-xDFW-OGG//HNL-NRT//KIX-BKK//DPS-HKG-LHR-MRU//NBO-xLHR-xJFK-SCL.

We then changed the SCL//EZE open-jaw to an actual flown flight, so that the new itinerary was CJC-xSCL-IPC-SCL-EZE-JFK//EWR-xDFW-OGG//HNL-NRT//KIX-BKK//DPS-HKG-LHR-MRU//NBO-xLHR-xJFK-SCL.

In so doing, it raised the cost of our DONE5 ticket by $190/ticket. Given that it looks like I could buy a ticket for SCL-EZE via a VSAPASS for quite a bit less than $190/pp (although maybe that doesn’t include taxes?), does that seem right?? On a related point, because I only found out about this new rate during my one day in Toronto and “had” to ticket it more or less on the spot, is there any point in arguing these taxes with AA now that I’ve already made the purchase? The tax "breakdown" on my ticket is kind of opaque: YQ: $125 CDS; AY: $10.18 CDS; XT: $574.26 CDS.

Thanks much.

/*/ Also, fyi for anyone else thinking of going to Niagara Falls for a two day trip to buy an RTW ticket, Niagara Falls feels a bit like Atlantic City. We stayed at the Embassy Suites, which seemed to get very good reviews on FT. Eh. Every hotel we saw seemed to feel overrun with kids and tour groups, and the food in general was pretty sad. Much, much more pleasent was driving through the wine region and stopping at the different villages on the way. That made the trip for us, and we enjoyed the ice wine a great deal!

Also, if it helps anyone else plan, we flew into YYZ, did a one-way Avis rental to the Niagara drop off (on the Canadian side), and then took a taxi to BUF and flew Southwest home. Much cheaper to do this than to do a one-way rental from Canada to the U.S.