Thank God you've got Skype!

I hope you're on the verge of something good.

Perhaps now may be a good time to cut out the last few posts in this thread and start a new thread which will hopefully have some good news soon.

Personally, I've made contact with three different travel agents in Mozambique and all say they are able to ticket a xONEx. I've given them a draft itinerary so we'll see.

Thanks danger.
Please keep me posted. I prefer to book through airlines because I ultimately change a lot of dates and times and if I call QF I get to the front of the queue due to my status.

Thanks, 747-444. i'm actually ready to construct an itinerary because I want to fly in mid-August.

FWIW, QR appears to have a city ticket office in Maputo and I have the number; but they don't answer the phone. No answer from QR when I asked on FB for an email address for Maputo office.

New thread created
 

This is an excellent idea and I have created a new thread, http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onewo...periences.html - which I'm going to make "sticky" - to cover this and other situations involving the booking and ticketing of various Oneworld products.

I'm not going to move posts from this thread to the new one so as to keep some sort of continuity; however for ease of access by others it would be helpful if you could reference posts in this thread to those in the new one. I'll also keep this thread open until a reasonable "transition" period has elapsed, then I'll close it.

Gardyloo
Oneworld moderator

cool. i want to book some DONE4 or DONE5 ex MPM. would be cool to know more? i contact one agency via facebook but no reply...

The other day I was talking to one of the US AA atw desk agents whom I know from previous interactions. She told me that the credit card address restriction has been dropped and that their desk is now able to book atw fares from any starting point at the published rate by simply converting to USD without regard to the fare from a US origin. I haven't actually had a chance to try it yet, but the agent was absolutely categorical in stating that there is no more restriction as to credit card address and country of origin of an atw ticket. Anyone who has an itinerary ready could try it out.

what is aa rtw phone number? going to test out..

1-800-247-3247 AA RTW desk. This is not classified information. Not even Hillary would get into trouble for using it on a private system.

But you still have to get the ticket issued in the country where your itin starts, so for MPM, that would be Mozambique.

The three agents I'm in contact with have said they will be in touch. The first of these, whom I contacted almost three weeks ago, I'm doubtful will produce anything. The other two sound more encouraging.

If and when I get something I'll post again.

I specifically asked about that and was told that the AA desk could issue the ticket. As I stated, I have not actually tested the information yet.

Yeah, the credit card restriction was removed some weeks ago. I got also tip about it from an excellent AA RTW desk agent, who remembered my previous booking, when I contacted about other matter.

Not all of the RTW desk staff were aware of the credit card rule change, but just ask to price reservation in US dollars, it should be then possible to pay it with US desk.

I already started the booking process beginning of the last week, because of the fine tuning of the itinerary and holidays in US, the purchasing process took long time.

I finally got my exMPM DONE5 booking for next year paid and ticketed yesterday. I paid with AA platinum desk, with no questions asked, when the reservation was already in the system as rated. The base fare was 185,350.00MZN that they converted to 2,921.00USD.

However, taxes and carrier imposed charges were quite high because of my routing. I needed to use BA flights because the rule sheet doesn't allow flights segments between Middle East and Europe when the ticket originates from Africa and utilizes backtracking to Africa. Taxes were 479.37USD, YQ and YR were 1,253.10USD, so the total price was 4,653.57USD.

At least one AA RTW desk agent was aware of cheapest starting points for DONEx and instantly knew why I wanted to have an exMPM fare. I would guess that the cheap exMPM xONEx fares will not exist very long time now when it is easy to get those.

Does anyone have experience starting a xONEn ex-MPM?

The reason I ask is that I'm curious about the visa requirements. The details on the Mozambique embassy web site here in Washington DC is not as detailed as I would have hoped.

Their web site does mention a transit visa, but no details and nothing specific to a transit visa on their visa application form. It appears that the price of the visa for a US citizen is $160 USD and must be obtained in advance. It does not provide information on how far in advance you can apply for your visa.

If anyone has experience with this, your insights it would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, I also checked the Destinations | Africa forum but found little helpful info. Only two threads had info within the past year, and most of that was from UK folks.

Thanks a lot for sharing. May I ask your routing that required the BA flights as it sounds like I'm doing something similar? Also, do you know are the high YQ charges imposed on all BA/IB flights or just BA?

My routing is MPM-xDOH-ORD-MBJ-LAX-LIM-SCL-IPC-SCL-xJFK-HKG-KTM-KUL-ICN-HEL-xLHR-NBO.

I would liked to have routed the ticket from HEL to NBO via DOH, but the rules don't allow flights between Europe and Middle-East when the itinerary utilizes backtracking in Europe/Middle-East. So I needed to use BA flight LHR-NBO.

In addition, QR flight DOH-ORD have higher carrier imposed surcharges, but I can't had routed it from DOH to ORD via Europe, because I needed to use backtracking and I wan't stop at HEL later on the trip. Also it seems that stop at KUL causes higher taxes and surcharges than many other Asian cities.

I haven't tested pricing lot of IB flights, but at least all BA/IB flights that I tried pricing with have caused high YR/YQ surcharges.