Stephen Patterson

travelbugging

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread whether you shared your reports, routes, and/or helpful links! I read this thread a few times over and read all the posted links before embarking on planning my first RTW with ANA. Initially my mom wanted to only do Taipei but for 20K more, why not go around the world Planning took me a day and then perfecting it while I waited for my MR points to transfer over took another 3 days. Happy to report that it was ticketed today! (btw I thought that we had a thread where all the RTW routes that have been booked were posted in the wiki, am i mixing up my sites/another thread?). Here is the final itinerary that my mom and I will be starting in mid-March:

LAX-TPE (BR)
TPE-SIN (BR)
SIN-KUL (SQ)
KUL-BKK (TG)
will be doing LCC from BKK-REP-SGN
SGN-IST (TK)
IST-JFK (TK)

All in business for 115,000 miles + ~$600 taxes/fees per person. Some thoughts (and reiterating what a lot of posters have already said) on the booking:

• In retrospect I should have dropped the SIN-KUL and KUL-BKK segment and just flown on a LCC between those places but I wanted to get from Asia-Europe-America in 2 segments only and the only availability I found was the one I booked or BKK-DXB-YYZ (not surprising since the trip is 2 mths out). The dates for the BKK-DXB-YYZ were not favorable. Either route would have clocked in at around 18.5K-19K miles and since it is 115K ANA MC miles for a trip under 20K miles I might have well have added those very short segments for "free".
• I calculated the miles between each city using Great Circle Mapper and found it accurate.
• And I used Matrix ITA Software to calculate the fees required and it was only off by ~$40. Don't forget to add the $25/person phone booking fee to your total!
• Used United to search for availability and then confirmed availability on ANA award booking site. With the exception of one flight, ANA was able to book everything I found.
• It took 13 mins to book everything!!! ANA phone agents are truly the best (but I believe I helped some in doing all the legwork for them, ha).

I have enough points to do another RTW with my SO (I hope this amazing deal is still around!!) and will definitely make sure to plan ahead for that one. Again thank you all so much, wouldn't have been able to plan this one so smoothly without you guys!

john c wisconsin

Travelbugging
What a great trip, I am sure you will be nominated for daughter of the year. So great that you could find routes that worked close into departure date.

It looks like you should get to go through the new IST airport (now opening 3/3/19) which sounds cool and I hope they have their act together if you have a long lay over there.

Have a great trip and thanks for posting what you booked and the pointers on what you did to find your routes.

travelbugging

Thank John! I will be either be daughter of the year or an old adoptee by the end of this trip - 1 month with my mother is going to require a lot of patience, haha.

If the amex transfer took any longer I am sure I would have lost all the US-Asia EVA routes. We already need to position ourselves to LAX because I desperately want to try EVA business class.

I didn't know that the new IST airport will open in March, very awesome and can't wait to (hopefully) experience the new Turkish Lounge there - have heard great things about the one at the current IST airport. I will also be doing a stop in IST so if you or anyone else has any must-sees/must-eats please message me. Happy new year!

john c wisconsin

Yes The original looks amazing and they are said to be replacing with something great as well. So far I have not seen any information about the new lounge so post some pictures if you get to enjoy it.

John

Pseudo Nim

ijakov

Hi, I am aiming to book an ANA RTW for 3 persons in J for Aug 2020 and am interested in following:

1. Expecting that it will be extremely difficult to find 3 J seats available on a single flight, I intend to try to book as soon as booking window opens. Can I initially book all the flights with the same date even though we obviously could not fly them in that sequence? I would later try to change dates of flights as respective booking windows open.

2. When making changes to a booked itinerary, I understand that I need to keep the same route/flights so the ticket doesn't have to be cancelled and rebooked. Does it mean that I can only change the dates of booked flights and must keep the flight numbers the same? Or I can change the flight numbers (eg a morning flight to an evening one) as long as departure and destination remain the same?

thanks

john c wisconsin

ijakov.
1. Corrected: min 10 day trip to book RTW. You can book tight in dates but of course there has to be enough time to actually land, connect etc. So your second flight might have to be a day later etc.
2. You can change flight numbers. So if the airline has another flight on the same route (no new connections) you can change to that flight if it becomes available. Airline and Route have to stay the same. Date, time and flight number can change.

I also believe it might be possible to book on same airline but on a code share flight so on someone else's metal. I can not confirm this other then when looking for award availability under the code share airline it shows. So if Lufthansa has a flight you booked ORD-FRA but then United opens up availability for the same route but code shares with Lufthansa and it has a Lufthansa flight number in my "theory" you could book the united metal. Might be worth a call to ANA on this concept or maybe someone has experience that could confirm or deny it would work.

Good luck in your bookings.

John

ijakov

Thanks John.

I am looking at the following trip
FRA-TYO on NH
TYO-HNL on NH
HNL-SFO on UA
SFO-YYC on AC
YYC-FRA on AC

These 5 flights could be squeezed in 3 days, so that should be close enough. However, another less than ideal circumstance is that UA opens booking 338 days in advance, while NH and AC have it at 355 days, so I have to hope that AC and NH availability does not dry up by the time UA opens their window.

Also it seems that NH is offering only 2 J seats per flight, so we'll have to get creative around that,

I will try to start booking in few months and will share the experiences.

john c wisconsin

In the end are you actually looking to spend time in SFO and YYC or are those just "good" connections and airlines for cost? Trying to snag the new NH A380 metal to HNL, nice.

John

Vyvd

The departure date of the last flight must be at least 10 days after the first.

ijakov

Yes, SFO area is one of destinations/stopover as well as Banff park in Alberta.

I spent some time exploring NH award availability and it looks like drying up really fast once it opens 355 days out. This makes HNL-SFO leg critical as it can be done only on UA and they open app 20 days after NH. I may have to work out an itinerary with NH and AC only.

Also, I have not seen any NH flight offering more than 2 J seats for award tickets. Anyone seen 3 or more J seats available on NH? Or I can assume 2 is max and not hope for more?

john c wisconsin

We leave on our trip in a few weeks. We found 3 in J for several legs on several airlines including ZRH-SIN, SIN-KIX, HND-ORD. When I was planning original trip there were lots of other legs as well. This was mostly in April/May '18 looking for Feb/March '19.

I took my tracker and filtered down to just ANA flights. Not really your routes but you can see what I had at the time. The dates are on the top right columns (starts 2/21) and then it shows the number of seats available (1,2,3 or X means none) in the cell. The most I was ever looking for was 3 so some of these could have had 4 our more at the time. Hope this helps in some way. Good luck. John

adosiaz

Does anyone know how ANA handles changes? Are they allowed, are there fees etc.? I can't find the information on their site. Thanks.

Vyvd

Changes are free, but the routing must be exactly the same and flown on the same airlines. So e.g. you can't change SIN-TPE on SQ to BR.