I haven't found that to be the case. I book with the RTW desk exclusively, and often have no trouble booking flights showing as little as D3 in EF, although I try to keep towards the higher D class availability flights.

I must pick flights that are more jealously huarded by the operating carrier. For example, JL 5 JFK-HND can be wide open in EF or for a regular booking, but D0 for an RTW, per both JL and AA.

IIRC JL 5 is now operated with 351 equipment on most days. That's the new JL seating and my understanding that JL guards 351 flights jealously with respect to both awards and discounts.

Booked the following through the AA RTW desk. Very helpful staff, easy process after I worked through stingy BA LHR-MLE inventory, actively avoided OSL-DOH-MLE in January 2027 due to the gulf conflict, and had them correct an error in pricing.

OSL-LHR-KUL-MLE-KUL-MNL-HKG-SFO-JFK-GRU-xDFW-SFO-DOH-SEZ-xDOH-OSL

When this was first sent to pricing, they rated this route as a DONE6. I called to point out the error and the agent sent it back to pricing for correction to a DONE5. The agents were perplexed, when they look at the fare class on their screen it always shows as a DONE6, and that is clearly wrong. They mentioned the pricing group should have caught this error the first time.

Total cost for 2 pax - $18,760 USD (base fare $6,777 each, taxes and fees $1077, carrier fees $1526). It is optimized for my AY program to retain OWE.

If BA ever opens up some more January D class on LHR-MLE I will look into changing the ticket to OSL-LHR-MLE-KUL… as it is more efficient and frees up two segments for SFO-ANC-SFO. But BA seems to only release two seats 330 days in advance for January, and it is literally impossible to have that as the second segment on a DONE before they sell out, because you need some time to fit in the rest of your itinerary as dummy segments, sigh.

I would imagine we're in for some price hikes this year, let alone YR/YQ

Sure, and the previous way the operating carrier would handle that is to have little 'A' and 'D' inventory. Instead, there's plenty of both, just not available for an RTW.

I booked OSL-DOH in September before the war. Keeping an eye on it.

It seems unlikely that you have $2,585 in true taxes and only $18 in carrier-imposed fees.

True. On my existing DONE6 ex OSL purchased last November I was able to get a receipt for the whole trip from the AY site. I paid a total of just under $10k US. The base fare was NOK 74667 (about $7500 at that time) with taxes and fees of around $2500. Of that $2500 the receipt listed $1846 in YQ (fuel surcharges), with the remainder being composed of about 22 separate small ($7 to $96) charges for specific nation and security related taxes/fees. So the carrier imposed fees (YQ) are about 74% of the costs above the base fare. I remain curious how that $1846 gets divided among the various airlines involved.

Amadeus can check availability using the "/PC" command to query based on Point of Commencement (PoC). Sabre will need segments from the same origin booked first before availability display changes to that specific PoC (or in case Sabre has a command for that, I haven't found it). Would be happy to try to check at some point if a flight has availability (assuming same married segment status) for a particular PoC but not for RTW. It would be difficult to match PoS, though.

In my case, the point of origin is OSL and the flight in question is JL5 JFK-HND in September. So perhaps a simple test might be OSL-LHR-JFK//JFK-HND, in mid to late September.

True, that was the high level breakdown from AA. Drilling down into the Taxes and Fees reveals a line item for $1508 in carrier imposed fees.

When the Point of Commencement is OSL (with "/PCOSL") added in the command, indeed there was no D availability at all.
But without "/PCOSL," the availability looks a lot ampler. In this case, the Point of Commencement (PoC) is assumed to be JFK.

Simply, JL doesn't want to release its JFKHND seats when someone originates from OSL. Obviously, if someone originates from OSL wants to fly JL's JFKHND, the person likely is looking at an RTW, so that could be JL's reason to restrict availability. However, the restriction not only applies to A and D classes but all booking classes in the F and J cabin. I don't know why. However, once again, I think PoC is the player here, not the fare.

Thanks very much for doing the test.

I wonder if someone were to try and work around a point of commencement restriction by using, for example, a U.S. point of commencement, and then adding additional flights to the front, if the restricted flights would stay confirmed.

From an availability point of view, it would theoretically be a workaround. However, for many airlines these days (certainly including JL), if a TA were to do that, the TA would get a very big fine and may have booking/ticketing access suspended. If an airline employee were to do that, I dunno... Maybe they can get away with it, but you will have to find one rookie/careless enough to do that for you without a good reason.

That's very interesting info, especially for someone who tried (in vain) to book a DONE HND-JFK flight on JL with an OSL POC. Does D availability appear for those same flights with a TYO POC?