I want to book LHR - SIN - HKG - LAX - ORD - LHR, so far no issues except need to do all this in 8 days and I seem to recall there is a min stay of 10 days. Its not feasible for me to stay longer in ORD etc as have to be in London for a wedding. Can I just add on a future leg eg LHR -DXB or am I knackered and have to pay full fare ?

Many Thanks

The problem is that you are only allowed one entry/departure from your country of origin, so when you get back to LHR the trip is over.

You could fly to MAD with IB then take a cheapy fare back to London. If I'm not mistaken???

You could start your RTW in Sweden or Denmark (which, in Business for example, is about �1000 less than starting in the UK). You can fly to CPH or ARN anytime you like to start the RTW, and the itin would be ARN - LHR - SIN - HKG - LAX - ORD - LHR - ARN.

It would not help, because of this rule:

what aboout doing ord-gla or man stop and then lhr later, alternatively would ord-bru stop and then lhr later (and I basically get a train or sep flight to lhr ?

Youn cannot, because the 10 day rule ex-Europe is between *intercontinental* flights (see post #5).

Oh dear. ok what about ord-mad stop mad-somewhere in africa - lhr ? as think the difference in price done3 versus point to point is huge.

You cannot go to MAD or -any- other place in Europe. Nor can you fly from North America to Africa direct.

many thanks for your help viajero, looks like a lost cause for my rtw.

Not entirely. While the 10 day rule is bullet-proof and cannot be circumvented, you might be able to live within the rules. Buy a separate roundtrip ticket trans-Atlantic, breaking your RTW in North America for a while. This gets you back to LHR on the date you want, while the RTW does not do the last intercontinental flight until later (up to 1 year validity).

That's exactly the solution I was going to propose. ARN/GIB-xHEL/LON-SIN-HKG-LAX (-JFK?) on the RTW. Fly back to the UK on a separate ticket, then return to N. America later to pick up the remainder of the trip, and optimize your RTW. You could also use your remaining allowed 3 Europe flights (with 2 stopovers) in addition to any remaining N. America pieces when you do. Even if you rode on MaxJet (or used miles/copay/MFU) on the non-RTW transatlantic bits, the cost savings achieved by starting the RTW in Gibraltar or Sweden rather than in the UK would probably cover most of the difference.

(Note if you started in Stockholm you could make an easy connection in Helsinki to Singapore on AY, and get to try out AY's new J beds.)

Great thinking. If I stick with leaving from LHR and as you say stop in ord and buy a separate ticket to get me home for the wedding and then I pick up my rtw sometime later in ord, how can I maximise it from there and though know dates can be open presumably re routing would attract a fee ?

Depending on how you get to ORD, you'd have 5 NA coupons left (including one transcontinental flight) and all 4 in Europe. The USD125 reissue fee would be small change compared to the optimising you could do. You'd need to have the ticket issued with an open return date to LHR in the first place, and when leaving N. America the second time you'd have to go somewhere else than the UK if you intended to use the Euro segments.

You really want country of origin to be other than UK. If you cannot go to Sweden to take advantage of the lower fare, at least go to AMS and start from there on the RTW. Then you can return to LHR and do flights like LHR-DXB later. You cannot re-enter the country of origin, so once you land in the UK, you cannot leave UK if they RTW ticket is bought there.

From ORD you can fly AA ORD-DUB-LHR for about half the price of ORD-LHR; or you can go to JFK and fly out of there (often a lot cheaper than ORD-LHR).