QF longhaul and BA longhaul are the likely culprits. Worse if you are stopping in LHR instead of just connecting.

Issued on QR will lower the surcharges.
BA / QF / AA are the highest ones.

It sounds like getting it issued on Qatar is very challenging, unless you have a good travel agent you're willing to pay.

I think that if you are talking to American Airlines, you can ask if they can share information that's within the fare calculation line within the price quote.

RTW agents worth their weight in gold. Mine (nufnuf) cost less than the surcharges on just one sector LHR-HND selecting JL vs BA.

How much does your charge, if I may ask, and is the charge repeated for each ticket reissue?

There is nothing challenging at all about plating on QR stock, you just have to use a travel agent. But as others have pointed out TA fees aren't so high that you'd not want to do it that way. You'll save tremendously on YQ / YR fees in most cases. There might even be other plating carriers that could work out better than QR on fees, but your itinerary doesn't include any segments on them so wouldn't matter in this case. This is where a travel agent who has spent a little time to play around with different options in the GDS is so valuable. You'll pay them a token amount compared to the savings in YQ / YR quite often.

The BA operated / AY-coded LAX-LHR will likely credit as if it were a BA flight.

Buried deep down in the BA Club T&Cs under the Finnair section: . NB the poor wording is BA's, rather than my own.

If your schedule allows, a workaround would be to book the AY operated LAX-HEL.

In which case they should add the bonus TPs (Fully Flex Club World 1,100 tier points)?

I wonder how the fare paid would be visible to them as the ticket issued by QR. This flight is being flown early July so I'll report back.

Yeah, this is where the recent changes to BA Club bonuses are a total mess. I hope this works in your favour. AFAIK, there's no direct mapping from cabin prime and subclasses to these definitions of flexible, non-flexible etc. Though if you use the BA Tier Points calculator, it does group JCD together into "business flexible." - note it doesn't differentiate between semi and fully flexible in this table. If there's any shilly shallying, I'd say you have a case in your favour. Though I would also be screenshotting stuff. How unlike BA to make a change like this without thinking through how to transparently explain it to customers. :rolleyes:

As Matt highlights in his most recent episode ..

RTW fares are published fares, so they are visible for all OW partner airlines (most of them also use the same system Altea).

Different then Bulk fares, then the actual fare is not visible.

They just divide the ticket price by the number of flights to work this out?

Isn't it sector mileage divided by total mileage, in which case it would be 1/9th vs 1/16th (sectors on my DONE4). 1/9th base fare is c £450.

I can't speak for British Airways, which is what I think the original question was about, but in terms of American Airlines crediting AA coded flights to my account, ticketed as part of an around the world ticket, I've had some really bizarre earnings, I've had some super short flights that credit a lot of miles, and some longer flights that barely credit any miles. Most of them were posted as utilizing the fare and not distance.

But if it's not consistent amongst all OW airlines, then don't you end up with the potential scenarios that either you are getting benefits or disadvantages on less than (or more than) 100% of what you book? Is that expected? It seems strange to me - my natural assumption is that the airlines all agree, that if you need to make a calculation for a flight that you are responsible for, this is the basis. This could apply to YQ / YR, crediting Avios, or loyalty scheme points, or any other metric.

EDIT: so a straight-line basis (i.e. ticket cost divided by flights) or a weighted basis (segment mileage divided by total mileage multiplied by ticket cost) would both be options, and would be consistent for all OW airlines

I think what you're saying objectively makes sense I have a feeling frankly based off of my experience with AA that many of the loyalty systems may not be engineered or set up to deal with 16 segment trips with lots of carriers and lots of complexity.

Ha! Yes I should remember not to give airlines too much credit...

My experience crediting to AA is that usually the base fare is pro-rated per segment by the ratio of the segment's distance to the total flown distance, with YQ/YR allocated to specific flights. With AA, flights booked as AA, BA, or IB are supposed to earn by fare while other oneworld airlines earn by distance, with a table that shows base earnings as a percent of flight distance based on booking inventory plus a cabin bonus that's a percent of base (also based on booking inventory), and for those with status on AA, an elite status bonus that's also a percent of base. Often, even flights on BA or IB do earn by distance (which is typically a lot more than by fare, for an RTW), and sometimes even AA-coded flights earn by distance.

Even more or less straightforward itineraries may include flights booked as different airline codes. The mechanics of prorating the base fare of each pricing unit (e.g., outbound vs inbound) by the flight distance of each segment covered by that pricing unit and adding in any YQ/YR are essentially the same and scale from a simple one-way to an RTW. In my experience, multiple ticket reissues (common with my RTWs) tend to make AA's crediting system fall back on distance rather than fare.

Even more complicated, as some sectors are longer then the other ones.

Have 2 trips, with 5 unused flights (due cancellation QR) Refund Application just filed.
Note: recalculation of Round the World fares always needs to be verified by the issuing carrier.
I am good with numbers, but this makes my head buzzing.
When have an answer from Qatar let you know.

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!

Oneworld sub forum --> https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onew...nging-fee.html
The QF agents in South Africa (Mindpearl) are better than some other QF agents around the world. The chances of talking to a QF agent in AU is low. Unless top tier QF status.

For the same points should not charge the US$125 fee. As you noted base fare cannot change if first flight flown. They may have recalculated real taxes for that segment or maybe all the flights yet to be flown on the complete ticket. A recalculation of QF's YQ/YR maybe. The application of YQ-YR needs to be writing by Oneworld. A big failing by OW.

In your quote of the rules you missed the "local service fees".
QF change fees --- https://www.qantas.com/en-au/book/fl...hedule-of-fees
Rule 3015 16. VOLUNTARY CHANGES / REROUTING / PENALTIES
The USD125 is not listed for 2a.

Back when where you purchased the ticket mattered, I purchased a fair number of xONEx tickets from Mindpearl. (They were paper tickets back then, which were sent to me in Boston by DHL.) I always found them quite knowledgeable, on a par with the AA RTW desk.

Those were the days, emailing South Africa to get tickets done. Fun times. Very competent and low fees.

nufnuf77 , I know flights can be booked that way (LAX-JFK to AY, JFK-DFW to QR, DFW-LAX to AY), but really just out of curiosity, you don't think the airlines will fine you for violating the "INTL ONLINE CONEX/STPVR TFC ONLY" restriction on some of these flights?

Yeah violating the traffic restrictions for US domestic flights seems especially risky even just as a passenger... US DOT is notoriously twitchy about cabotage and there have been reports of people getting denied boarding if the airline catches it.