I've been reading this site for the past few months and I know that there are many seasoned travellers here and I'm hoping someone can help a lowly noob sort a few things out

Goal: I'd like to plan a RTW trip for April/May/June of 2013, I'm thinking about traveling for 6-8 weeks total and would like to find award flights for the following in J:

Home airport: BWI but could travel from other nearby airports
BWI - SYD (1 week-ish in Australia)
SYD - BKK (1-2 weeks in SE Asia)
BKK - LHR (4 weeks Western Europe)
LHR - BWI

Travel dates are flexible, as are the departure and arrival cities, my only sticking point is I'd *like* the flights to be long-haul and non-stop if possible. This is primarily because the descent always makes my head feel like it's about to explode and it's usually a good 24 hrs before I can hear normally again so I'd like to limit the number of descents if I can. And if I can't, well, beggars can't be choosers I guess.

I plan on using rail/bus/possibly RJ once I get to a general area (SE Asia, Western Europe) to travel around further.

From reading this forum it seems like a RTW ticket would be the most cost efficient way to make this trip happen but I'm running into a few problems...


1) How do I know how many miles a RTW OneWorld (or is it just AA?) award would cost? I did some searching but haven't found anything that looks official so at the moment I'm estimating 280-300K miles for J. Would this change depending on time of year?

2) I signed up for 2 Citi AA cards 6 months ago and have approx 170K miles right now. I did 1 personal and 1 business card so I don't believe I can get approved for the 2nd 75K personal at this point. Assuming I need 280K miles I would need to acquire 110K more miles in the next 8 months, are there any other programs that transfer into AA miles without being really devalued?

Other miles/points I have now:
CO - 50K
AMEX MR - 76K
UA - 13K

3) If I can't manage to get my AAdvantage account up to 280K would it make sense at all to try and book one-way award flights since I could transfer the AMEX MR points to some other program and possibly use the CO miles as well? Book a flight or two with AA and one with BA for instance?

From the searching I've done on the FF sites so far the one-way awards look ridiculously expensive. I know I've seen many threads where folks find low-mileage-cost flights so it seems to me I might be doing something wrong in my searching.

Oneworld award chart

You should be able to get another Citi Biz card for 75k more miles. And the max you'll need is 220,000 miles.

AA distance-based award is called OneWorld award. It is NOT a RTW because you dont have to do any RTW, nor you have to travel in one direction. In fact many folks just use it to visit Europe with multiple stopovers at a very cost-effective way if starting from East Coast.

There is an excellent STICKY in AA forum that you should study it thoroughly so you know how to construct your itinerary.

Since your plan is in 2013, you have enough time to prepare for this. Australia is notoriously difficult to book just so you know.

UA has an award literally called RTW, but it is very expensive.

US can do a mini-RTW with regular awards provided you know how to construct it.

I would suggest you to concentrate on AA program as AA miles right now with the mega bonuses still going, you have a bigger chance to amass enough miles. OneWorld STICKY in AA forum is a MUST READ/UNDERSTAND in order to book this efficiently and successfully.

To calculate your miles, keep in mind you cannot use a beeline - for example BWI - SYD, you obviously have to at least transit either at JFK and LAX, (the routing easier to get award seat on QF), or BWI-XXX-DFW-SYD, or BWI-XXX-LAX-SYD/BNE/MEL,... it all depends on how can you find the seats.

The tool to calculate your miles traveled would be this:

http://gc.kls2.com/

You can purchase a low priced domestic one way ticket to get you to west coast for the beginning of your award - thus cuts down 2K miles of distance traveled.

Also dont always think you would need to start / end your award from your home airport BWI. You can easily get to JFK from BWI to cut down the segment / miles used up on your award.

Either you use 25K zone (150C - 150K AA miles in business) for this, or see if you can work it down to 20K zone to reduce the miles required. AA OneWorld STICKY is a de facto Help Thread so you should go there, study up the rules then ask questions.

You can of course combine a OneWorld award with other awards, not necessarily from AA, thanks to the one-way award system that both AA & UA have. Your CO miles will be UA miles effective 1/1/2012 anyway... And your MR would cease to transfer to CO by 09/30/11. So make up your mind before that deadline!

Use this website to figure out how many miles in the air you'll be doing:
http://www.daftlogic.com/projects-go...calculator.htm

Then check that amount with this chart to see how many AA miles you'd need:
http://www.aa.com/i18n/disclaimers/oneworld_awards.jsp

I did a quick calculation and I think you could do that trip for under 25,000 in business class, which would be 150,000 miles.

What you want is very easy to achieve for very few miles (less than 200k/person for sure). Actually, it should only cost you 135k.

The one thing you'd need is a few more AMEX MR points (which you can transfer to AC's Aeroplan program). The beauty of Aeroplan is that they allow you to make TWO stopovers IN ADDITION to your destination.

So, if those are really the only stops you want to be making, you can book that through AC, no problem. Routing would be tricky, but many many people have made "mini rtw" trips on AC miles thanks to the two-stopover-rule.

Think it's a bit too much of a hassle? Check out that link in my signature

But seriously - there's no need for you to spend 2 or 3 HUNDRED thousand miles on this itinerary!

Even after the must recent devaluation of Aeroplan's award chart? People were cleaning out their points left and right booking the "mini" RTW trips just prior the end of July.

The cost of miles has gone up a whopping percentage effective Aug 1.

Yes, even still. Sure it's not AS great, but way better than a "official rtw ticket."

But he has the miles for it right now. He doesn't have to work for more miles to accomplish his goal.

If he can earn enough MR pts, the Aeroplan route is feasible if he only wants 2 stopovers.

OneWorld award allows many more stopovers up to 16 segments but OP might not need it at all.

Awesome, I love this place. Thanks everyone for the links and info, I read through the oneworld sticky in the AA forum that Happy suggested, it has been very helpful.

If I'm understanding everything correctly I need to book flights on at least two OneWorld carriers, can schedule in stopovers, and the actual number of miles flown will determine how many miles I need to book the award.

So I think what I need to do between now and when I can book is find the exact flights I would want.

If I look at the flights scheduled in April-June 2012 would they likely be the same or similar as those available in April-June 2013? I would think so but you all know better than I.

I believe I've read this on FT before but why is that? The carriers have few or no award seats when the flights come out or do they just get snapped up fast?

One other thing, with all the possibilities for flights and routing how does everyone here keep it straight? I'm thinking I'll have to come up with some sort of Excel spreadsheet so I can figure out which route/carriers would be best.

Flight schedules are fluid depends on the economics - demand, fuel cost, operation efficiency, etc etc

Because OneWorld has only ONE carrier - that is QF, that flies between Australia and North America - QF, BA and even AS members can book the QF flights at 360 days out versus AA members can only book 330 days out - a full month later than the awards are opened to book. Australia of course is one of the hottest award destinations. Huge demand versus very limited supply making it very difficult. However, with a OneWorld award it means you can go through Japan or Hong Kong to reach Australia, or even take the long route from Europe or South America - therefore open up extra options versus a partner award you can only go from North America to South Pacific without transit in 3rd region.

Your goal right now is to accumulate your miles and worry about your flights 9 months later because the EARLIEST you could even book, would be 330 days from your first flight... given your long spanned itinerary, you may need to seriously think through how early you want to book so that your last leg of travel would still be within the 1 year validity of your ticket - that would mean you could not even book at 330 days out because it would mean you have only ONE month to do all your travel!

Go to OneWorld site it has a wonderful Interactive route map - the Blue lines are those you would look at - they are OneWorld Members own flights that you can use, ignore the Red line that is for the codeshares cannot be used for award.

Post your question in the OneWorld STICKY thread you would get a ton of helps there on how to fine tune your itinerary to optimize the usage of your miles - chances are you would be using the 25K zone. The goal is to visit as many places as possible within the confine of the rules given the fact that apparently you have allocated good amount of time to do this trip.