Yes, sorry - I was trying ex-MEL and ex-ICN, so converted all the prices into USD for my comparisons. The price was presented in AUD - I think it went from about AUD$5100 to AUD$6600.

LONEx fares are seasonal. For 14/Jan/15 departure they are in AUD ex-Australia
LONE4 3,899
LONE5 4,499
LONE6 5,199

Tokyo is a cheaper departure point than Korea.

They used to be seasonal (and the fare basis code was different for high season). They haven't been for some times.

I have time on my hands, so...

First investigation

• using the online tool (rtw.oneworld.com)
• very simple LONE4 starting and ending in SYD (SYD-HKG-LHR-LAX-SYD)

* so I looked only at the total of taxes and surchargesI will add the second investigation shortly (it will navigate through the qantas.com web site to the tool in order to see if there is any difference)

Edited to add:
Second investigation

• Starting at Qantas.com.au and clicking on its Round the World link, which takes me to the online tool at rtw.oneworld.com but with Qantas branding instead of Oneworld branding (the url is https://rtw.oneworld.com/rtw/?origin=QF)
• Enter the same itinerary as before (specifying CX as the first carrier)
• Get the same pricing as before
• Click on Proceed to Booking
• AND THE PRICE INCREASES
• looking at the list of taxes and charges, there is an additional line of "Multiple Carrier Surcharges/Fees" totalling AUD 297.70

Mmmm

Oh - When did they change? I remember in 2000 I bought a LONEx which was seasonal. But I guess 2000 was a long time ago ;)

I have a copy of the April-2008 rule sheet. Economy fares ex-Australia and ex-UK/Ireland had seasonal fares
The next copy I have is March-2012, and all seasonal fares had gone by then

Narrows it down a bit;)

The times that I've clicked through to the booking tool via the QF website, it still goes to the oneworld site tool, it just has QF branding instead. I haven't noticed any other difference.

My DONE6 ex-JNB has now been ticketed. Thanks for help everybody :)

Now I better do some OT to actually be able to afford 7 months off.

And this is what I expected too
But see my Second Investigation in post#875 above
- Qantas DOES increase the price

What is a multiple carrier surcharge/fee? Is it something Qantas have made up (as a charge for them to have to deal with multiple carriers?) or is it various charged applied by multiple carriers and shown as a single value?

It's how they aggregate together all the various YQ and YR (aka fuel fine) surcharges

In my first investigation above:
- creating the itinerary in the online tool with CX as the first carrier
- then amongst all the various taxes and charges are these two linesIn my second investigation:
- creating the identical itinerary, but getting to the online via the Qantas web site
- the same two lines appear, and in addition this lineGo figure

So I did some more investigation yesterday. I was getting the correct base fare in two browsers, whether I visited qantas.com or straight to oneworld.com, but the other browser continued to show a base fare of AUD$5k (for the exact same itinerary, down to dates) even after closing and reopening. I finally cleared the browser cookies and cache and it started showing the normal fare - I have no idea what happened there, but I sure am glad I wasn't just going straight through to book it through qantas.

I also priced it ex-Tokyo, thanks for the tip. It came to about $100 cheaper but I think the extra trip to Australia is worth that to me :)

One more unrelated question - if I just leave the FF# blank during booking, can I add my Alaska airlines number separately for each flight through the airlines, or just claim the flights with Alaska after taking them? (They are all Alaska partners, except Qatar Airways. I'll put the Qatar miles on American but would like to get status on Alaska as my main airline).

The frequent flier number is stored in the PNR (passenger name record) which is not unique to each airline but rather unique to each booking system. So you only need to add it to each booking system. You can amend this at any time before departure.

QR and BA both use Amadeus, so they would see the same frequent flier number; AA uses Sabre so they would not see it (unless BA deliberately cross propagated to the foreign booking system, which actually they would do normally, but with so many partners on a non-standard itinerary they might not).

The difficulty is you want your QR flights credited separately. You could go around fixing it at every airport when you check in, that should work, "Is my Alaska/American frequent flier number in the booking please?", but the "safest" way would be to retroclaim every flight coupon.

yea, I think I'll go with the post-flight claims. Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about the Amadeus/Sabre shared info.