Oneworld travel agent charges
 

I got quoted £1915 plus tax (£800)by Trailfinders for
LHR-JNB-HKG-DEL-HKG-KUL-CGK-SYD-AUK-SYD-EZE-LIM-SCL-MAD-LHR

however they also add a £150 "Trailfinders Service Charge"

Is this normal? Do all TA add some sort of fee for booking ONE tickets - are there any which charge less but are still reputable?

Also what do you think of the route - (I am doing S Africa India SE Asia incl Bali OZ/NZ and S America in 12 months)

the reason for going SYD-AUK-SYD is that I don't want to be in NZ in their winter - if I do NZ first I can be there in autumn and then go to OZ

Thanks for your help

Welcome to FT!

It's customary for Trailfinders, as far as I know. Trailfinders and STA (if eligible) are evidently the biggest TAs for RTWs; no idea if STA's fees are similar.

Is that quote inclusive of fuel surcharges and other taxes?

The route is fine as long as you're happy with it. BTW the code for Auckland is AKL; AUK is Alukanuk - where I've been, a rather remote village on the Lower Yukon in Alaska.

The Trailfinders service charge is a bit of a rip-off, in my case they didn't disclose it in advance then added a similar charge per person! I canceled the whole itinerary and booked with ebookers instead, they had a 35 EUR service fee at the time.

I would have bought it from AA but they did not have time to issue the paper tickets.

Any OW airline should be able to issue a xONEx, AA is recommend.

Agents do charge varying fees, as this is their source of revenue.

AA RTW desk is very good, but IIRC, they usually require (or at least prefer) at least one long haul, over water segment to be on AA metal for them to be involved. This has been discussed here previously, but I can't recall the thread.

AA still issues paper tickets ?? :confused:

Many travel agents charge a fee. The days of agents surviving off just airline commission are over.

This was for a 20 segment RTW, a while ago :(

They still do. I was on the phone with AA SYD (the actual CTO, not the call centre) the other day whilst they were trying to reissue my DONE4. And they mentioned that they still do paper tix under certain circumstances, eg open dated coupons, airports that don't accept etix etc.

Yup. Just bought a 12 segment AONE4 from Mindpearl in CPT, including one surface segment. Last four were open. According to Mindpearl, open segments = paper ticket. Even better, this was an old fashioned ticket, three consecutive four-segment handwritten tickets on 001 stock, complete with red carbon. I hadn't seen one of these in years, -- neither had the check-in agents at LAX.

Attn QF 009

I'll send you a seperate message too, but I did not know AA had an office in Sydney...Do you have their number and it could come in handy....

As to the originator of this thread

As far as I know, agents have been charging fees for at least 10 years....Is this your first trip in a while?

The AA desk in Switzerland charged me a couple of hundred CHF booking fee (on top of the ticket cost) when I recently hada DGLOB34 ticketed through them.

Is it AA in Switzerland or the GSA????That is another one that I would like the phone number for...If you have it

All here:
http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?...oneContact.jsp

You can't actually contact the SYD office directly. You'd talk to the call centre in BNE, which will queue your booking to SYD for ticketing. I got the call from SYD CTO as the BNE people didn't insert my CC details correctly, and they wanted my mailing address just in case they couldn't produce an eticket.

The AA sydney office is not open to the public, nor are telephone numbers for it publically available. They do deal with bookings (e.g. issue tickets, receipts etc) from there; I have dealt with them this year in relation to some LONE4s. e.g. FAXing a CC authorization form;