When did you purchase the ticket?

There was a significant rule change that came in the with the 22-Apr-2016 version of the rules which is relevant to your situation - I'm assuming here that the issue your airline has is that you have stopovers in Europe/Middle East both before and after your trip to Africa (LHR and JTR before JNB and DOH after)

If you purchased the ticket on or after 22-April-2016, then yes your ticket is invalid
But if purchased before that date, then the ticket is valid

The relevant rule before 22-Apr-2016 stated, in part:
Your itinerary satisfies 3.1.3, and it does not require one of the visits to Europe/Middle East to be a transfer without stopover (unlike 3.1.1 and 3.1.2) and therefore you are allowed the stopovers you have in your itinerary.

Not sure what a small claims court would make of that policy ... but I'll refrain from arm chair lawyer mode for now :D

With regards to South Africa, would something like xxx-LHR-DOH-JNB(stop)-HKG-xxx be permitted on a 6 continent ticket?

Wow, great find! How do I retrieve that version of the rules?

We purchased the ticket January 13 2016 but asked to have this particular route change (along with some other changes) made on July 6th 2016, and it was accepted. In that case, would it still apply?

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)

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)?

what happens if i am a no-show for a flight that ends up in me breaking one of the rule of the RTW ticket? In my example, I'm flying BLR-HKG-SIN but have maxed out my stopovers in Asia. I really want to do a stopover in HKG, so what I'm thinking is no-showing for my HKG-SIN flight and simply paying whatever the penalty is for the no show to reschedule the HKG-SIN leg for another day, thereby "buying" an additional stopover. does this make sense?

www.xe.com lets you set exchange rate alerts.

My guess is that the remainder of the ticket would be voided by doing this, so I really don't think it makes sense. But that's just my guess.

you start in asia? otherwise, there are no limit on stopovers..

i start in asia, that's right. tokyo to be exact. there's some dumb rule that i dont quite understand but basically the system will not let me put BLR-HKG as one leg and HKG-SIN as another.

hence my idea to have BLR-HKG-SIN as one and simply miss the HKG-SIN flight, pay the penalty and reschedule it.