RTW help for a newbie please.
 

Hi,

I just found this great forum.

I am a BA silver card holder. I would like to buy a RTW business class ticket as follows;

I wish start in London then go to Lusaka in Zambia and then South America and then the USA before finishing off home in London.

Is it possible to do that sort of journey or do i have to go via Australia ?

My preference would be to miss Australia and take in parts of Asia . Is that possible?

Many thanks in advance.

Well clearly to go round the world you have to go through either Asia or Australia (or both if you wish). However, you have a problem in that Lusaka only appears to be connected to London in the OneWorld system, which means that you are going to have to use at least one sector by some other means to be able to use a OWE RTW ticket.

Note also that the UK is an expensive place to buy business class tickets - you could save a lot of money by getting a ticket starting somewhere else (e.g. GIB) and this might also help you with the routing to get you in and out of Africa.

The basic structure would then be:

GIB-LGW//LHR-LUN <overland to Tanzania/Uganda/Kenya> DAR/EBB/NBO-(x)LHR-EZE-<rest of S America> - <N America> - Asia - LHR//LGW-GIB

Where "overland" means either just that, or a separate ticket on another airline. You have 20 segments in total. You can't stopover in London en route from Africa to S America. Let us know where in S America, USA and Asia you'd like to go and we can fill in the details.

Thanks for the speedy reply, much appreciated.

My preference is something like this (essentials in Caps)

LHR-LUN (could be joburg and i do an internal return to lusaka), preferably into Asia (BEIJING-HK and if possible Singapore or Tokyo), then to South America (santiago, BA, RIO,LIMA, then to USA (preferably Tampa but can be Miami and then back to LGW.

My prefered routing looks like this

LHR-JOBURG (or LUN)-Singapre-HK-BEIJING-Tokyo-South America-Miami-LHR

Is that possible without flying back over London from Africa?

Thanks

This should be doable:

LHR-LUN//JNB-HKG-SIN-HKG-PEK-HKG-SYD-SCL-EZE-GRU-LIM-MIA-MCO-LGW.

You'll need to get a separate LUN-JNB ticket, as well as GRU-GIG-GRU if you want to do Rio. You could do Tokyo as well by buying two additional Asia sectors on top of the four you get included in the DONE4, so you'd add a HKG-NRT-HKG trip into the mix. Until JL joins oneworld, you pretty much have to fly via HKG for everything in Asia. I'm a bit rusty on the details, but IIRC you have to fly via SWP to South America, so that means adding an extra continent. (Is or was a North American transit allowed for Asia-South America?)

You could further optimize your routing by adding five more segments in North America if you want to maxmize miles.

Yes it is. You could replace SYD with a transit through JFK in your example.

This is fantastic info and i appreciate it very much.

Is it best for me to book directly with BA for something like this I assume they still have their travel shops? Or go through an agent?

If so are there recommended agents on this site?

Many thanks

you can book direct with BA (the travel shops have now all closed) but as somebody already posted buying your ticket in the UK is expensive.

I have just bought my trip through Bland's Travel Agent in Gibraltar. If you email them your route they will sort it out and send it to BA to be priced. Once they get that back (it took 7 weeks for mine to come back) you can pay via credit card and they courier your tickets to you in the UK. All you need to do is to fly out to Gibraltar to start your trip. The small cost for this is nothing compared to the savings you get. They even did my Australian visa for me, saving me a few more £'s. Apart from BA taking forever to price my route, it has been really easy and I would recommend Bland's to anyone.

I will give them a go. I wanted to book directly with BA as i get triple points and i guess the fare will be expensive so for my wife and i i would get a lot of ba miles. But as you and christep have pointed out the cost savings will be beneficial to me.

Many thanks

I'm assuming your maybe paying with a BA AMEX card? When I paid using Bland's the only part I paid to Bland was the booking fee. The actual fare is paid to BA so maybe this would help you out?