Presumably the airline would claim that the ticket was issued in error and would want to arrange some type of refund calculation. Given some of the recent DOT decisions, I see this as the most likely alternative if you're not satisfied with flying the rest of your itinerary with no changes.

Advice welcomed
 

Hello everyone,

I wonder if I can impose on your collective experience. I've not booked an RTW fare before but two upcoming business trips and a family issue have me strongly considering it.

My two business trips are:

1. GVA-PEK-NGB-PEK-GVA April 23 outbound April 28 return

2. GVA-JFK-GVA May 2 outbound May 3 return

The family issue is my elderly father has been dealing with a complex hospitalization involving his wife in Vancouver for some time now. I am considering joining the above two trips to allow me to spend a few days with him (and his wife). If I do so I pay the additional cost over what the two trips would cost (4,300 Swiss francs), so I'm keen to keep the price as low as possible whilst still flying OneWorld carriers in business.

The requirements of my trip would be:

GVA-PEK (dep April 23)
PEK-NGB (dep April 25)
NGB-YVR (dep April 27 or 28)
YVR-JFK (dep May 1)
JFK-GVA (dep May 3)

I expect the PEK-NGB travel might best be considered surface since it takes me 2 hops to get there with OW and I will be with colleagues taking the 1435h Air China PEK-NGB flight. I've checked the OW routing and I would need to leave our meetings one hour earlier to make a PEK-HKG-NGB connection.

I tried configuring an itinerary using the OW online tool but this fails, telling me I have insufficient connection times in HEL, HKG, and LHR despite connection times of over 3 hours on each occasion. I contacted the BA RTW email who gave me a quote for the itinerary of about 9,500 Swiss francs. Since this well over twice the cost of the two trips booked separately it is a non-starter, which is of course disappointing to me given that part of me would like to see my dad and do what I can to help out.

Any thoughts on how I might find a RTW fare with OW carriers in business for the above with a cost closer to 5,000 Swiss francs would be very welcome.

RTW base fares vary considerably depending on where you begin and end the trip. A business class 3-continent Oneworld Explorer bought and started in Switzerland has a base price of CHF8,520 (plus taxes and fees.) The same ticket bought and started in the Euro zone has a base price of CHF 6,864, and in Norway CHF 6,267. So for the price of a one-way "positioning" ticket from GVA to OSL you'd save over CHF 2,200 in the base price. From there, an itinerary like OSL-HEL-PEK//NGB-HKG-YVR-JFK-LHR-GVA-LHR-OSL would be possible.

After taxes and fees you're probably looking at close to CHF 7,000 for the Oslo ticket, so that's considerably more than the CHF 5000 you're trying to match, but obviously way less than the CHF 9K BA quoted you. Of course the RTW gives you up to 16 flights and you'd only be using 8 or 9, so much of the value is being left on the table.

You might think about planned travel during the balance of the 12 month validity of the ticket. RTWs can be effective when used in the context of a year-long travel "master plan," where one purchases the ticket on a different continent than one's home, then uses one's home continent (in your case Europe/Middle East) for "stopovers" which maximize the efficiency of the ticket with regard to routing and stopovers.

Gardyloo, thank you for that. Extremely helpful. I suspect this information is somewhere in the 100 or so pages of this thread, but is there a resource that provides the RTW base fares by starting country?

Oneworld doesn't list prices anymore because most countries, and the EU, have prohibitions against advertising airfares that aren't inclusive of taxes and fees. And because every RTW ticket is different - different national taxes, airport fees, carrier charges etc. - it's impossible to comply with those rules, so they just pulled the fares.

A couple of third party services like KVS - http://www.kvstool.com/- and Expert Flyer - http://www.expertflyer.com - have fee-based services that will allow you to query RTW fares, but these require "premium" memberships. Or any travel agent can pull them up off the GDSs for you, if you have one you're able to ask. You can also price it using the very wonky and unreliable online tool from Oneworld (a scandalous piece of electronic junk) but it will take a toll on your soul to do it.

Not to mention your sanity.

All, thanks for your help! @pandaperth, those rules were a great find. Happy to say we got our ticket rerouted just the way we wanted it. :)

Help from DONE3 experts
 

I have a DONE4 that was issued and travel commenced last year as follows: CAI-DOH-SYD-LAX-LHR-CAI.
1). Anyone speculate why that would have been issued as a DONE4 and not a DONE3? My orig routing is a EU/ME-SWP-NA-EU/ME.
2). Would I be able to maintain DONE4 by changing to the following: CAI-DOH-SYD-LAX-LHR-xJNB-DOH-CAI
3). Or, CAI-DOH-SYD-LAX-GRU-LHR-DOH-CAI?
3a). Assume that I couldn't modify 3) to instead be ...-GRU-xJFK-LHR-DOH-CAI?

Thanks

Because travel between EU/ME and SWP is regarded as having touched Asia even if on a direct flight. This is explicit in the rules.

Correct. And so the OP can change his/her ticket to explicitly include Asia. This could be before or after Sydney

To add either Africa or South America would change the ticket to a DONE5, but actually going to Asia will leave it as a DONE4

Well done
and thanks for reporting back

can i open jaw from cai to jnb?

say it ends like lhr cai, jnb wdh.

the reason that i ask is that we have ex mpm done5 and another ex cai done4. we want to reticket ex mpm to stop to cai, and then fly out from cai. but ex mpm ticket must end in africa,

one solution is to do cai doh xxx where xxx is africa, but one has to pay the tax and yq.

if open jaw is allowed, we could do cpt jnb to end in africa and we may not fly the segments. and cpt jnb should have low tax and yq.

Yes

See rule 4(g)