Questions on oneworld Rules
 

When my attempt at an open jaw did not produce any savings I was directed here to see if a RTW would work. I have read the rules. I have run the itinerary through the oneworld web site. It seems to work, but I have a couple of questions about such a ticket.

The trip is much later next year. It consists of DFW-LHR, 2 hour wait for LHR-IST, a land segment of three weeks, then DXB-HKG with a few hours in HKG to connect to HKG-LAX.

The questions are:

Is this a legal itinerary?

What does the minimum 10 days mean? I take it to mean the entire trip from beginning to end must span at least 10 days.

All the tickets will be F, except for one which is a J only flight. How likely is it that I will find myself downgraded as none of these will be full fare F tickets? If I cannot be 100 percent certain of F on these long flights I would prefer to just pay a full F fare.

Welcome to the slightly esoteric RTW world.

Your itinerary looks perfectly legal to me, and would count as an "AONE3" as it's in First and would involve 3 'continents', as defined by OneWorld: N. America, Europe/Middle East, and Asia. You can finish in LAX if you wish, or add up to 6 other N.American flights in First for the same price. These flights can be open-dated, and can be taken at any time (assuming OK availability) up to 12 months after you departed DFW in the first place. (The rules for these extra flights are a little more complex, but the major limitation is that you can only have two stops more than 24 hours, and I guess one of them would already be taken up in LAX.)

Yes, the rule is that the trip cannot be completed in less than 10 days, beginning to end. Your three week "land segment" will easily take care of that.

As for availability, it should be noted that these A-class tickets are not quite as flexible as full-price F. If you want to change at the last minute, there could occasionally be an availability problem. That said, there are A-class seats available on 2 of the 3 AA flights DFW-LHR for the next few days; full availability on HKG-LAX, and A is the same as F on CX from DXB to HKG. (Some DXB-HKG flights are already full in both F & J.) Your biggest potential availability problem doesn't appear to apply in your case. That is the D class on BA from LHR to IST. (When there is no F, you go down to D, not J.) D class on BA is often full by the day of travel, but so long as you don't want to change right at the last minute, you'll be OK provided that you reserve a reasonable time in advance.

Edited to add: If you have an OK A-class reservation, you have just as much right to a seat in the First Class cabin as any F-class ticketed passenger. I personally am not aware of downgrading of A-ticketed pax having happened, although I guess it's possible in extreme circumstances, e.g. the President's wife demanding a seat. Has this happened to any FTers?

Thanks. I am pleased to see I correctly surmised this was an AONE3. Such weird terms in air travel.

More questions since this looks like it may work.

The estimated fare for the AONE3 is 10,600 v 19,849 for the separate full F fares. Does this difference seem reasonable?

Will I be able to select my seats at time of purchase on all flights as one normally may with full fare F?

How far ahead should one generally purchase tickets of this sort?

Seems very reasonable to me, especially if you take a free trip somewhere once you're back. :D

I'm pretty sure you can, but I'm not au courant with AA practice. FWIW, I have selected my seats on my ex-CPT AONE5 on BA, even though it's an AA paper ticket. Best to check with whoever sets this up for you: your TA or the AA RTW desk.

As always, ASAP. Mine is so far ahead that only the initial flights can currently be reserved. In practice, 2 months is probably sufficient, but more is better if you can. Less (say, 1 month) would work as well, but you increase the chances of hitting some major event of which you're not aware. e.g. If coming to GVA, flight availability is a nightmare during the Auto Show. Unless you're in that world, the show dates are unlikely to be in your diary and you could be find that all flights are full.

Edited to add: You should also be aware of the danger of a pre-emptive jump in prices of xONEx tickets, as recently happened with the Circle Pacific fares. Once the ticket is purchased, the fares are locked in, although your position should AA go under is debatable.

I believe I will use BA all the way to IST. Then CX all the way back from DXB through HKG to LAX. LAX to DFW will be AA I suppose. I will pursue this further with my TA. Thanks again.

Downside of using BA from DFW-LHR is that currently you earn no AA miles for this. Hopefully, this will change if AA/BA get the same anti-trust clearance as has been given to others.
Upside is that you don't change terminal at LHR & have bigtime clout with BA for LHR-IST if your flight from DFW is delayed.

Actually, one of the few fare codes that really makes sense - it's a Oneworld Explorer ticket covering 3 continents that is in first so it books into A inventory.

The fare is what it is. Most people would consider it a much better value than a full fare F ticket.

It depends on the airline. Flights are only loaded 330 days out, so anything beyond that you can't reserve the flight, let alone a seat. If you're trying to cover days that are more than 330 days out, that's not a ticket problem - you just need to tell them the routing and then come back later and select specific flights.

AA - can select seats any time.
CX - doesn't assign seats more than 6 months out
BA - used to have some issues with advance seat assignments for non-full-fare F and J tickets (i.e., A and D) but I think they've changed that now.
QF - shouldn't be a problem but sometimes they won't pre-assign all seats (and you're not flying QF, so you don't care).
AY, JL, LAN - don't know but you're (probably) not flying them anyway.

A trade off.

Book now, lock in the flights you want (and hopefully seat assignments). Get peace of mind. Pay now.

Put it off. Risk lack of availability. Risk price going up. Save 'interest cost' associated with paying now.

*******

Other things to think about -

The cost of an AONE4/5/6 - covering 4, 5 or 6 continents (adding South America, Africa or Australasia) is incrementally not that much more than an AONE3, so if you have any interest in going anywhere on those continents, it's worth considering.

No matter how many continents you have, you're limited to 16 flight segments (and ground segments, e.g. IST-DXB) count against the 16 limit. You must go from one continent to the next (east or west doesn't matter) but you cannot backtrack from continent to continent. You cannot return to the point of origin until the end. However, there is no requirement to do the whole thing in one trip. You could, for example, go DFW-LHR-IST, then get a flight home to DFW from DXB on a separate ticket (or go to LHR on this ticket and fly home from there), then later on fly back to IST (or DXB or LHR) and carry on with the rest of the ticket.

For example, you could go DFW-LHR-IST-(cruise to)-DXB-LHR. Get a separate return ticket LHR-DFW-LHR to get you home. Go back to LHR (6 months later if you like) and do, for example, LHR-NRT-SIN-HKG-LAX-ORD-HOU-JFK-MIA-JFK-DFW. This uses up only 14 of the 16 allowed segments so you could add another 2 in Asia or in Europe (but if you do them in Europe, you'd have to do them before you go to Asia, as you cannot 'go back' to Europe once you leave).

You're allowed up to 4 segments in each continent and 6 in the U.S. However, you're allowed only 2 stopovers in the U.S. (because you started in the U.S.). It would probably be better to add 2 segments in both Europe and Asia and drop 2 from the U.S. Once you get back in the U.S., don't go home (DFW) until the end so if you want to actually go home in the meantime, go somewhere close (Houston, for example) and drive (or fly on a separate ticket) home. All segments need to be done within 12 months of starting.

Maybe ....

DFW-LHR-IST /cruise/ DXB-LHR //home on separate ticket // HEL-CDG-NRT-SIN-HKG-BKK-HKG-LAX-ORD-HOU-LGA-DFW (with HOU and LGA as stopovers and ORD just a connection). The possibilities are endless ....

We are thinking along the same lines tt7. It just occurred to me a few minutes ago that this type of ticket is very flexible. The problem will be understanding all of the rules so that I may make full use of it. For example, if I do the routing I mentioned, why not stay in HKG for a day or two on the way back from DXB as we must stop there anyway. What I meant by reasonable fare is the savings seem so large I wanted to be sure I was not missing some hidden cost. No doubt I will have more questions as I read further on this. Thanks for suggesting I look into this sort of thing.

If you haven't done so already, I suggest you read the "sticky" at the top of this forum, which lays out a lot of the rules.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=338667

[One thing I notice looking at it quickly is it says you can have up to 20 segments. That's no longer true - it's now 16 segments. Also, surface segments (e.g., IST-DXB but also even LGA-JFK) now count against that 16 segment limit, although they don't count against the continent-by-continent segment limit (i.e., 4 flight segments in each continent, except the U.S. where you're limited to 6 segments)].

The rules are also on the oneworld website, in a PDF document -

http://www.oneworld.com/content/libr...rule_sheet.pdf

As for the "missing hidden costs", they are of course (a) the time you can spend travelling the world on these tickets and (b) the hotel (and other) costs incurred along the way .... :) You can have as many stopovers as you like (except in the continent of origin, where you're restricted to two) so ideally you fly stopover-to-stopover, minimizing places that are just connections, and get to visit a lot of good places...

There are many posters in this forum who are intimately familiar with all the rules etc., so if you have questions, just post away and somebody will know the answer.

DXB is in Europe (at least for the purposes of this ticket) so once you leave Europe (and go to HKG, which is in Asia), you can't go back to Europe. If you want to do any extra segments in Europe, you have to do them before you leave the continent (on this ticket).

I thought I just realized that I had suggested an invalid routing earlier - that is, DFW-LHR-IST /cruise/ DXB-LHR //home on separate ticket // HEL-CDG-NRT. That's 5 segments in Europe (LHR-IST-DXB-LHR-HEL-CDG) and you're only allowed 4 - however, it's only 4 flight segments (because IST-DXB is a surface segment) so it is, in fact, ok. The IST-DXB surface segment counts against the total 16 segments you're allowed but doesn't count against the maximum of 4 you're allowed in Europe. I think that's correct - if not, someone will very quickly correct me!

I had suggested HEL in that routing because - apart from Helsinki being an interesting city, worth a day or two to visit - as Finnair's hub, it has a lot of connections to other places in Europe (basically anywhere Finnair flies, obviously). Only downside to Finnair is they don't have F on their longhaul flights (or in Europe, but then nobody does in Europe on the shorthaul flights - it's like 'F' on AA in the US). From Helsinki, you can take the ferry across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn in Estonia - we haven't done that (yet) but Tallinn seems to get high marks from those that have. If you're interested -

http://wikitravel.org/en/Tallin

If you do LHR-IST//DXB-LHR as 2 of the 4 permitted flight segments in Europe, you could also just go somewhere else in Europe (Barcelona? Vienna? Prague?) and then back to LHR, before leaving for Asia. If you do a separate ticket from LHR to get you back to DFW (and then return to LHR later to continue the ticket), you can obviously do those 2 extra segments in Europe either before or after you return to the US (on the separate ticket). As I said before, the possibilities are endless, constrained only by the time and funds available.

There are no hidden costs other than your normal taxes and fees. And yes, the savings are substantial especially if you use all 16 segments and if you use them for flights which would normally be very expensive.
This is one of the reason why this ticket is so popular. But we are all expecting massive price increases for those tickets ex USA and other markets soon.

Thanks to all for the replies. All very useful information. I have read through the stickies, as well as part of the oneworld web site. I will doing more research on this topic. I do hope the increases are not too much. Still at the prices I calculated this type of ticket is about half price from the total of the various one way tickets.

I wouldn't be surprised if the increase will be 30-50%. So I would buy early and then change the routing later for the $125 fee.