Apologies for the new thread but I couldnt find clear information elsewhere - or alternatively I may simply be too dumb to see what's in front of me :-)

In the past (a couple of years ago now), when I bought RTW fares in business class, the Oneworld website made it quite easy to see the cost of a 3-continent fare in business; I believe it was also possible to to see where it was a bit cheaper to start from (in my case Taiwan rather than Hong Kong because of the easy connection to the start point). It used to cost around USD 7-8,000 to go RTW.
Am I right in thinking that it has become almost impossible to work this out now? When I look at the Oneworld itinerary validator (which is in principle a good thing), I only get to know the fare after I've put in all my flights. For example, putting in an itinerary Taipei-HK-London-NY-Tokyo-Taipei cost me the equivalent of USD 20,000 whereas creating an itinerary that had several more flights inside Europe and several more inside the US (more segments overall) came to around USD 10,000. I know fares have gone up in the last couple of years so I guess today's $10k is the $7-8k I used to pay in the past. But $20k seems way too much for a D class RTW and the process of creating the itinerary before you know what it will cost (and therefore realise that the exercise was pointless) is somewhat frustrating.

Am I doing something wrong or missing something that makes the whole process easier?

Many thanks.

The country-by-country fares were removed from the oneworld web site last year. This thread discusses that - http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onewo...fic-fares.html

This tool gives the cost of various products - in USD always - http://www.wandr.me/RTW_Fares.aspx

With regard to your $20,000 and $10,000 itineraries - I'm not sure what was going on there, but I had an experience recently where some itineraries were displaying double the base cost, plus taxes and surcharges. I thought that had been cleared up but perhaps the problem has returned. See that last couple of posts in this thread - http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onewo...gs-thread.html

Excellent, many thanks. In fact I resorted to the very old fashioned method of phoning Cathay! Ticketing can't help but they can get someone to call you who can tell you the fare (around USD 10 as seems reasonable these days). My next step will be to call ticketing with the entire itinerary and ask them to have the RTW team check it and give me a call back. I have to do that because using the Oneworld itinerary planner told me that I had too many segments after I reached 12 and wouldn't let me book it online, I guess still some bugs. But Cathay called me back very quickly so it may not actually be too difficult to book it with them.

In my experience this message can mean:

• that you do have more than the allowed 16 segments, or
• that you have segments for which there are no direct flights and when the connecting flights are taken into account you then have more than 16 segments, or
• you have too many segments in an individual continent (allowed 4 per continent, but 6 for Nth America)

Expertflyer will also quote RTW fares by entering the same city for both origin and destination and selecting a relevant OW carrier.

Of course, these are base fares before surcharges, taxes, etc.

Current CX DONE3 fares:

ex-HKG - HKD 77800
ex-TPE - TWD 301159
ex-PEK - CNY 65490
ex-LON - GBP 4491

hth

Thank you, yes that was helpful in that it prompted me to look at other starting points that are easy to reach from HK. Including all taxes the fare ex-HKG came to US$10,800 (similar from Taipei), from London $8,700 and from Tokyo $9,300. Given this choice and my destinations, I'm going to get to Tokyo on Asia Miles, start from there and save myself $1,600 on the ticket cost :-)