thank you

Ticketing Problem
 

I found a DONE5 that worked really well for an unexpected sabbatical (layoff). I used the One World web site, went through the painful process of selecting dates and changing nearly every segment (since it never seemed to pick the preferred ones) and came up with a price I was willing to pay. I put it on "hold" and the email I received says to call American since the trips starts on AA 83 LAX to AKL. But the AA EXP agent says it's a travel agent ticket and they can't help me. I have to position myself in LAX since it seems to want me to fly SFO-PHX-LAX or SFO-DFW-LAX and that makes no sense. Apparently it can't book the Compass flights or something.

Are there better ways to put this together? It's too complex to book on AA.com and in fact their multi-city links you back to the same One World page I already used.

I'm excited about the trip since I have four weeks for the first time in my life. I'll get to 5 new countries and will have touched every continent but Antarctica once I'm done. Also, I get a nice long ride on the B788, my first A380 segment and my first QF and IB segments.

Call 1-800-247-3247 AA RTW desk and hand-feed them the segments you want. Most of the agents are extremely helpful and know the sytem. They will have to send it to the tarif dept for pricing, but they can give you a pretty good idea of what is legal and what is not.

Thanks!

EF doesn't seem to list ex-CAI fares any more. Anyplace else to get them?

I suspect that this thread will be among the first to publicize the (re) creation of xONEx (and other OW group fares) exCAI. I would wager xONEx fares are not currently available exEgypt. Any takers?

Happy wandering

Fred

it is a very worrying trend for two reasons.

1) The fare is pulled in the middle of the month.
2) they dont refile the fare.

it means that for whatever reason, if there is ever any good fare again, we can expect AA/BA will pull as sooon as possible. also, countries with volatile currencies may not even get a re-filed of the fare. it may dash the hope of getting any value fare from this point on.

Or they will refile the fares in a different, non local, base currency. eg, new ex-Egypt fares priced in USD instead of EGP.

The tip to call in worked great. The ticket is on hold pending fare validation and tax calculation and I'm off to get a travel vaccine consultation in the morning. Other than one segment where I couldn't get exactly what I wanted, the agent did great.

SFO-LAX-AKL/AKL-BNE-CNS/CNS-SYD/SYD-JNB/JNB-LHR-MAD/MAD-EZE/EZE-JFK/JFK-SFO. The one world explorer page couldn't book the Compass flights to LAX so it kept wanting me to fly SFO-PHX-LAX or even SFO-DFW-LAX, but the agent got me a Compass flight with plenty of time to eat dinner and enjoy a lounge at LAX even if there are some delays that day. The routing via LHR is strictly to get an A380 segment.

The only thing I couldn't seem to work out was getting to CNS by going AKL-SYD-CNS on the LATAM flight in the morning. Since that's a 787-900 it would have been interesting to compare with the AA 787-800 trip. I know I can have them try again after it's ticketed. EF shows D inventory so I don't know what the issue was.

If you see a good deal you have to jump on it. :) That's true in airlines or in hotels or even buying wines at the local supermarket. A business is not going to keep a submarket price around for very long, especially when that price is predicated on a collapsing currency.

true. that is why i have booked 2 ex MPM DONE5 and 1 ex CAI DONE4. and i had a DONE3 ex Japan, and another DONE4 ex JNB. it is just crazy that my family has purchased 22 DONE in one year since we started playing with DONE.

Just curious, how do you end up finding these good deals, such as exJapan etc.? Where can one compare prices for start points for these tix?

We keep an eye on the tariffs through ExpertFlyer or a similar product.

Generally any good deals will appear on this forum in short order.

To find these deals you generally want to keep an eye on global currency movements. Any kind of sharp decline anywhere relative to your home currency is probably going to leave some underpriced fares on offer; it often takes a few weeks before the fares are repriced.

Thanks. My preferences would be to start somewhere in Asia, so I'll start looking for options from there.

Is there a good way to get alerted if a currency has a large drop against the dollar (or pound or euro)?