The Air Services Treaty between the United States and Australia doesn't list US-Tahiti as an allowed route permitted to be offered by carriers designated by the government of Australia.

https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/168386.pdf
See Annex I at the back of the Treaty for the list of permissible routes. In particular, a carrier must only offer a service if it touches its own territory.

(It is important to note that codeshare flights are held to the same standard as prime flights.)

Therefore there is no basis in law for QF to sell this route.

I'm not in a position to see Resolution 727, but I'll take your word for it. My experience, however, with a DONE5 where a flight wasn't available in D at booking but became available prior to our first flight was that the issuing carrier refused to change to D until we'd flown at least one flight, insisting that they could only revalidate until the first flight was taken, and changing to D required a reissue.



That's excellent, thank you.

I am in the process of booking an RTW using a travel agent. This TA interprets the fare rules (as published in the GDS) as mandating the $125 fee for any reissue. The TA says that because my proposed itinerary includes some 4M codes (on AA metal), even a simple date change would require a reissue and hence the $125 fee.

Why does 4M require a re-issue?

If it isn’t their ticket, how would they even know?

My guess, and it's only a guess, is that the TA is saying that a revalidation wouldn't "take" or wouldn't be seen by 4M. But you'd likely know much better than I would what the TA means.

(I think the TA has been wrong about a couple of things, such as saying that if I fly HKG-JFK-EZE-DFW, that uses up one of my five North American segments, or as the TA put it, if I transit North America to get to South America, I would then be limited to hitting five airports, stops or connections, in North America; I don't see any basis for this in my reading of the rules.)

Even if issued by a TA, if the ticket is 001 (ie AA plated), the AA round the world desk should/will handle date changes. And if purchased in the USA, why would you not book directly with AA?

Other airlines handle date changes without the US$125 re-issue charge per the Explorer rules, but do charge a "service fee". Eg I am paying AU$30 to QR for such privileges even though booked with my long-time TA. QF would likely charge rather more.

Just wandering
Fred

Normally, I would.

Good to know, thank you. Why did you not have your TA make the date changes?

The TA does make the change. The airline's "rules" require a ticket re-issue for which they charge.

Just wandering
Fred

Most of OW airlines doesn't charge service fees when making changes for D or A class tickets, including QF. It's also country dependent, for example in some countries QR doesn't charge any service fees for any change, calling to their Doha res allows to make changes without the service fee.

2018-Jun-06 New Version of the Rule Sheet - one small change only
 

2018-Jun-06 New Version of the Rule Sheet - one small change only

According to diffchecker, the only change is the removal of the words highlighted:

Has there been recent changes to the other oneworld products? The general info text on the oneworld site about the xASnn now says surface sectors count as flight sectors. This wasn't the case before. The xASnn has an 8 flight sector limit, but prior uses have had surface sectors between airports (eg HND-NRT) not count towards the 8 flight limit, but did count to the 16 sectors e-ticket limit.

The Circle Asia & South West Pacific fare is not one I keep abreast of

I see what you saying about the form of words on the relevant web page
It is note 4 under the Terms and ConditionsSo, my view is that since words on a web page are NOT part of the fare rules, we need to look at the fare rules to see what they say.

In ExpertFlyer, I looked at a random fare (a CX DAS17 ex-SYD)
and it says nothing of the sort. It just says The Creation Date of the rule is 20-Dec-2016, so there has been no recent change to it.

The date at the bottom of the relevant web page is 1-May-2014. So I don't know if it has been updated recently, and they forgot to update the date of the page. But I don't remember the page saying surface segments count as flight segments when I last looked at the page (whenever that was!)

what was the meaning of adding flight segments? the xONEx fare is not dependent on the number of flights. why should it be recalculated?

I think it is probably a hang-over from the days when you could purchase up to two extra flight segments per continent.

That was removed a few years ago

In the old days it was possible to pay extra to add extra segments in each continent (within certain limits). I guess removing the phrase that pandaperth highlighted is just cleaning out something that is no longer relevant and which they missed when removing the capability to pay for extra segments.