My wife needs to go to Israel and South Africa in Aug/Sept, and having failed to make LY understand the intricacies of their (well-priced) QF/LY RTW, we booked her on a DONE4 originating in MRU, thinking that despite the access costs the savings would justify that approach. She has an award ticket to Europe, and we thought that even buying her cheap one-ways to TLV and JNB (via ADD) we'd save money by going the MRU route compared to other options. Well, here are the results…

Booked itinerary - MRU-JNB-SYD-MEL-LAX//YVR-JFK-xDFW-SEA-xDFW-SJU-xDFW-FRA-MAD-TLV-xMAD-JNB, 15 segments, no LHR transits nor stopovers.

Base price MUR 161,000, taxes/fees MUR 30,231, total MUR 191,321; equates to US$ 5,157, $968, total $6,125 respectively.

That's 18.6% in total taxes and fees.

When I saw that figure, and knowing how much it costs to get to MRU in the first place, I had BA hold the res and I contacted AA to get the price on an ex-ARN DONE4. I got the price back this morning from TAL Aviation in Sweden:

Booked itinerary - ARN-xLHR-TLV-xMAD-JNB//CPT-JNB-SYD-AKL-LAX-MIA-xDFW-SEA-xDFW-MIA-MAD-ARN, 15 segments, one LHR transit, no stopovers.

Base price SEK 45,000, taxes/fees SEK 2,324, Total SEK 47,324; equates to US$ 6,405, $331, total $6,736 respectively.

That's 5.2% in total taxes and fees.

All in, the total difference is US$ 611. Set against the Europe-Israel-Africa ticket costs, we're over a grand ahead by going with AA. Plus she gets lots more EQM and doesn't take the ET redeye to JNB via ADD (well, that might have been interesting for me, but for her… )

Moral to the story - BA charges and fees in monopoly out-stations - ouch.

Thanks for the summary, Gardyloo. I've been following your booking plans with interest and am not surprised by the outcome. Of special signficance was that even with wanting to include Africa as a continent (not just being forced to do so because of the MRU origin), MRU lost out. We are in the Sao Paulo AA lounge now on our way to NRT to start our DONE4 there next week.

My recent DONE ex-ARN by AA was ticketed with 6,9% in taxes and fees (full 20 segments). It's higher than Gardyloo's number but the ITN has 2 LHR transits + 1 LHR open jaw, so taking that into account it's quite reasonable, I'd say.

AA STO (TAL) is highly recommended from my side also from service point of view, excellent knowledge and very responsive.

I'm still building my knowledge on this so excuse my ignorance. If I ticket an ex-ARN DONE4 on AA can I still put my BAEC number against all the segments? My thoughts are that the ticketing airline has no impact other than taxes and fuel charges - is that true?

Very simple answer - YES!

The only caveat is if you fly AA across the Atlantic, no BA miles to be earnt - albeit this is totally unrelated to where and with who you ticket an xONEx. Moral is to choose BA, who offer a better product anyway.

Thanks - plan is to ticket on AA and fly BA where possible, also taking advantage of being able to use AA First domestically in the US.

I have now rung this through the AA RTW desk which was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. I have a locator that works on aa.com and some flights show on ba.com under my BAEC account but neither place has all the flights. Is there a place where I can view this to check the itinerary?

Also, is there a way to find out the price (tax, etc.) before talking to TAL?

The AA RTW desk will have "queued" the itinerary to the rates desk, where (usually within 24 hours) they will append a price to the record, which will be visible by TAL. Just email TAL and ask for the total, they will respond with the number and also with payment procedures (if you ask them.) Basically they want a fax of a credit card, but I'll let them explain.

Because AA and BA use different record formats, you'll need to get the BA locater number, which should be visible through the "manage my booking" (ha ha) functionality on the BA website. Give it a bit of time to get fully populated with BA, though. You won't have any problems having your BAEC account credited for all eligible segments.

That's a little strange to me as for my AA bookings aa.com "my reservations" tool tend to show the whole ITN for reservations with all the "Amadeus segments" (=BA, LA etc.) as well. The information is not updated in real time for non-Sabre airlines, though. So if I have a booking made by AA and I select/change a seat at ba.com for my BA flight, that information is not visible at aa.com at all, only the original seat reserved by AA themselves at the time of booking is showed on aa.com.

Another thing I find a bit strange with one of my AA bookings is that I cannot see the CX segments with any Amedeus based system (Both BA MMB and checkmytrip.com are showing only those CX segments which are immediately connected to another flight). If someone has an insight how to view the AA booked CX segments in real time, I'd be more than happy to know. I do have the CX locator but as I have no Asiamiles account it doen't do much good.

You made a booking with AA and aa.com is not showing all the flights? That is very odd. Perhaps the missing ones are open (not dated)?

I had a similar problem last week with my wife's booking. It turned out AA had "requested" the seat (on Comair/BA IIRC) but interface with the BA system was goofed up at the time and had left it "requested" and not showing up on the record visible on AA.com. I phoned back and the rep re-requested it and this time it cleared right away, and was visible on the computer record immediately.

I'd just phone back to the RTW desk.

Just to make sure I understand: what's seat assignment got to do with it all? Are you saying that because a seat was on request, the flight as such, the segment, was simply missing from the itinerary shown on aa.com? That's very odd (to me anyway). IME when a seat is on request, or simply unassigned, the flight on aa.com doesn't vanish into thin air.

No, sorry - not a seat per se, but confirmed space. The AA computer could not get the flight confirmed for her, and had "requested" the space. Until BA confirmed availability (the second call) it was missing on the visible (to me) AA record, but was still showing as "under request" on AA's screen. When I had made the first call to the RTW desk, the agent had said that she was having trouble getting BA to confirm segments (with other customers besides me) and that she would continue to work on it after we hung up. Evidently things only straightened out when I saw the segment was missing in the confirming ("E-TDS") email itinerary and on "my reservations" on aa.com, and rang them up the second time.

Ah, ok, thanks, in that case it does make sense.