Any good RTW TA recommendations based in Australia?

dutch_122 is Netherlands-based with a recognised TA (and a lovely person to boot) and regularly contributes to the knowledge base of this community.

Before I started using the AA desk, I once used The Travel Centre in Australia. Knowledgeable agents and excellent service.

Doesn't the base fare match accross the carriers, and the plating carrier therefore irrelevant unless you change codeshares/operating carriers withing the same fare. A quick glance exOsl DONE5 shows BA's fare ~30USD higher than QF/QR/AA etc. My understanging is that you cannot really play an aribitrage with plating carriers unless they have different base fares filed like it sometimes does happen. Otherwise to minimize taxes and surcharges, the only way is to look at codeshares. Gvernment taxes are set, you can only minimize those by changing your route/stopovers.

I changed from BA/QF on the OSL//LHR/PER to AY /QR OSL/HEL/DOH/PER and saved 2K in "other carrier fees". Firfeited a sector MEL/SYD which more than made up for it. Thanks to all for this thread!

Plating carrier should construct the fare using its own fare but sometimes they just use the other carrier's fare which makes one's price lower if the fares differ, other than that you can aparently play with code-shares and presumably get different totals given a set itinerary. Other than playing with changing itinerary or code-shares (presumably) and operating carriers btw the points, I don't see what travel agents can add that AA RTW desk can't.

AA requires at least one overwarter segment to be an AA flight which may be undesirable to some people here, they also will not book an AA operated flight with the code of another oneworld member. It sounds like they also charge higher YQ/YR for many flights than an independent travel agent would plating on Qatar ticket stock.

The base fares are normally the same across all carriers , but some carriers seem to be more aggressive at charging YQ/YR (the "carrier-imposed fee" a/k/a carrier overcharge a/k/a fuel surcharge).

YQ/YR is filed and adjustable, so it’s not random. At any given time, some carriers will be materially lower than others. If you know where the lower surcharges sit for a given segment (a travel agent could be useful for that), you can steer the AA RTW desk to use those—rates will then reprice accordingly.

In practice, the AA RTW agents are just inputting what you feed them, so you need to do the homework.

Also, AA e-ticket receipts are, as usual, borderline useless for understanding what’s actually going on. I typically pull the fare construction from CX, MH, etc.—their displays make it much easier to see how the numbers are being built across different combinations.Also, wanter to share a datapoint from an AA RTW ex-CPT.

Pulled YQ/YR off ITA per segment (operating carrier). Sum came to ~$2.5k across ~16 segments.

Actual ticketed YQ/YR: ~$826.

So: ITA segment YQ ≠ what RTW prices. Not even close.

What I’m seeing:

• AA metal → $0 YQ (as expected)
• BA short-haul → negligible
• CX intra-Asia → moderate but contained
• QR long-haul + QR-heavy clusters → main drivers

Conclusion: RTW pricing is clearly using constructed YQ, not summing filed surcharges. The dominant carrier on long-haul components seems to matter far more than individual segment values.

Also explains why QR-heavy routings price materially higher even when ITA totals look similar.

Takeaway: don’t try to add up YQ in ITA for RTWs — it will overstate by a lot.

Curious if anyone has a cleaner way to map filed YQ to RTW outputs, or if this is just black-box “rates desk magic.”

I'll second that. He's been very reassuring to have on board for Qatars problems.

Of course it isn't random, no one suggested it was.

I'm sure AA charges YQ/YR on overwater segments.

If you look upthread, there are posts here describing per-segment and also per-itinerary YQ/YR. Some carriers charge YQ/YR over the itinerary if they are the plating carrier and/or if they have a segment in the record.

Qantas agents are not terribly good at changes, even simple ones
 

Well, that was fun. I've spent the best part of two hours on the phone to a Qantas agent who I think, from their accent, was probably in South Africa. I was making a really simple change to a round-the-world ticket, the first segment of which has already been flown. I needed to change one flight by two days, between the same points. That should be free. I was charged a small amount for ticket re-issuing because the price had changed; that should not happen. Despite my trying very hard to make her understand what this, from the ticketing rules, meant:

They thought that "ticketed points" was something to do with using points to buy the ticket.
They insisted that I additionally owed a change fee of USD 125 despite the fact that there were no changes to the ticketed points.
And they thought that changes if the ticketed points remained the same required a re-pricing of the ticket.

All of the above is nonsense of course. I wouldn't have minded her not knowing, but I was given long, long waits while somebody else, I do not know who, was giving advice. If they didn't know they should have asked me to call back during the Australian day.

To cap it all, at the end, when I said that I would pay the money under protest because I needed the change made, I was then left on hold for half an hour because they could not find out how to charge me in yen (the first flight was from Tokyo) for the alleged repricing and in dollars for the alleged change fee. And then they said that there was an error and could I find another card? I found two other cards. All three of them were declined, they said, but it turned out that notwithstanding all that the first card had been charged anyway.

I accept that the mistake was mine in using the OneWorld website which then sent the booking to Qantas to ticket. But even so if it is the last thing I do on Earth, I will get this money back as a matter of principle.

Be careful, people!

@hsmall yikes. I wonder if it makes sense for your next change to see of another OW carrier can take over the ticket? Maybe AA who seems much more capable!