Last week I faxed my itinerary to CX Japan with a few questions and everything was taken care of very efficiently. After the the fax we changed a few emails because some flights were full and I needed to change the route. Our two DONE3 are now booked and they will issue the tickets after they get my credit card info. We have different surnames and I'm paying both with my credit card and haven't heard that it would be a problem.

So it looks like if your itinerary needs to be paper ticketed you'll need to pay in person. I'll see what happens when I try to issue mine.

If I get the same response as you after they look at my itinerary - I guess I know how I'll be spending my first 90 mins in Tokyo...

Well for some miracle reasons QF have HK1 my booking from NRT-SYD already. I think i will continue to use CX NRT to the do the ticketing.

Just wondering how much are you guys paying for surcharge and tax on a full 20 sector DONE4 (assuming you exit LHR 3 times) around 800USD?

Do you mean 3 stopovers?

Well basically you paid the premium class tax every time you leave LHR so on a DONE4 without extend the 4 sectors permitted in Europe, you have 3 opportunities to exit LHR.

APD only applies when you have a stopover. With that in mind I avoid stopping over in London more than once.

Unfortunately I will also get caught with the 4 sectors in Europe as I will need to use LHR for a stopover.

If you stopover in LHR, yes, if you don't not, that is why I asked. You can have 4 segments in Europe as per your example and not stopover in LHR once, if that is what you want, for a total of 3 LHR exits and zero APD.

Does anybody have experience with one of the airline offices
in Osaka? I would like to use miles on Skyteam or Oneworld to get
there in August and stay for about a week. Then, i would return
to Europe, starting a DONE4 or 5 from Osaka. But i prefer to
not travel via Tokyo.
Also, i read all the time about CX and AA issuing tickets,
what about JL?

Any OW airline can issue at any ticket desk; however, they are not required to. The only airline that must issue the ticket is the airline flying the first international sector on OWE ticket. And they can require you to issue it at the location that they specify, if you force them to do the issue (and they do not want to). Many ticketing locations are extremely reluctant to issue OWE tickets (with good reason, it is a lot of work and with a lot of rules that they are not familiar with). I have no experience with JL at Osaka, but expect lots of problems if you do so. My suggestion would be to book a minimal RTW and have the ticket re-issued after you get to Europe. Dealing with JL on complex tickets is a nightmare, makes BA look like a pleasure. The secret to booking OWE is to find an agent that likes to work with them (there are some).

Just an update. I finally got around to finalizing our DONE4 tickets ex-NRT and it went very smoothly. I set up a pared down itinerary with 13 flown segments and 3 surface segments with the US RTW desk and they confirmed that it would be an e-ticket and quoted the base price and the surcharges. Then the phone call to AA Japan took only about 15 minutes and they reconfirmed the e-ticket, the base price, and the surcharges. They took my credit card info over the phone and I received an e-mail with intinerary and ticket numbers within a day.