You must pay the extra tax.

In one case about 18 months ago with a similar situation an AA rep had to come on the plane and find me to ask me to pay the tax. The check-in agent didn't catch it.

fraserm, where do your parents actually want to go?

Before getting too bogged down in the relative merits of Mauritius versus South Africa etc. as a place to start, I'd focus first on where they actually want to go.

As has been pointed out, there are some places in Asia (South Korea or Indonesia) that, from a price point of view, may be a good place to start. Japan may also be a reasonable choice - currently about $7,300 for a DONE4. Singapore and Hong Kong are rather more expensive. However, the real question comes back to "where do your parents want to go?" Only when you have some reasonable idea of that does it make sense to start getting into the specifics of where to start.

It is also worth remembering that the trip doesn't have to be done in a single 'journey' - you can stop off 'at home' for a while and then continue on, depending on where you start from, where 'home' is and where you're going.

How much is it (I will be on a DGLOB34 - so business) ?

Is there somewhere one can look up what the various taxes, etc, are ?

GBP80 Air Passenger Duty to a non-EU destination on any class except the cheapest in the plane.

How about to an EU destination ? :)

(The rest of this is somewhat OT. Mods, feel free to move it into a separate thread if you deem it necessary.)

We have a DGLOB34, ZRH-LHR-ORD-LGA-ORD-DFW-HNL-NAN-BNE-DRW-PER-SYD-NRT-LHR-PRG-LHR-ZRH. I'm basically trying to get some "value" out of the last few legs, within the constraints that our LHR-NRT date is basically fixed (Sunday 26 October), and I need to go back to work (in ZRH) either the Monday or Tuesday after that.

(At 33769 miles and 1340 SCs, I think I've milked the most out of it I can while still getting everywhere we want to go.)

Since we're not Europe natives and are looking to do as much holidaying around during the couple of years we're here, pretty much any "interesting" destination is OK. At the moment I have the last few legs as LHR-PRG-LHR-ZRH, over the course of Sunday-Monday-Tuesday. I'm thinking that after I've paid for and had the DGLOB34 ticketed, we'll change the dates on the last 3 legs and get a separate ticket from LHR-ZRH to "get home" on the Sunday. Then, a few weeks later have a long weekend in Prague flying ZRH-LHR-PRG-LHR-ZRH and use up the last few segments of the DGLOB34 (another option I'm considered for the last 3 segments is LHR-PRG-BUD-ZRH, but obviously I'd need to decide on that before ticketing it).

We have friends in London, so we visit there fairly regularly. The somewhat circuitous route to Prague would just give us an excuse to drop in on them overnight on the way.

If the extra taxes I'll have to pay at checking are negligible (10s of pounds), I'm OK with that. I just don't want to get a scary "that'll be a couple of hundred quid, sir" practically doubling the cost of a dirty weekend :).

(Also, is there any easy place where I can lookup the various airport (not just LHR) departure taxes/fees ? Or is this something that requires significant research and hard-won experience ?)

Cheers,
CS

To an EEC member nation, tis £20.

Nobody seems to have mentioned it so to be fair to the OP: according to the rules you have to fly all segments or risk your flights being recalculated to the sum of the one-way fares you flew. I.e. *lots*. In practice there are few, if any, reports of the airlines imposing this or other penalties. If your parents aren't interested in clocking up miles into an established miles account then they have even less to risk.

Hi I'm in Melbourne as well, I figured the cheapest way of seeing the world was to use QFF points to get a one-way ticket to Cape Town in Premium Economy, then book through AA in Cape Town. I ended up getting a DONE4 for AU$6000 including taxes.

More details in my thread here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...=820307&page=3

The price of one way tickets to Africa and Mauritius are really expensive, it's probably better to start in Japan if you don't have enough points. Jetstar has flights to Osaka for $700pp including taxes and AirNZ to Tokyo for $850.

I didn't start in Asia because the rules states only two stopovers in first continent and I wanted four stopovers in Asia.

Japan is about US$450 more expensive for a DONE4 than S Korea or Indonesia.

One of the important criteria for the OP is a short positioning flight ('coz it will be in Y), which rather points to starting from DPS or CGK. (And I bet you can get from MEL to DPS for less than A$700-ish. ;))