ST RTW Planner finally in use!!
 

So I guess the RTW planner is finally in use! Kinda excited~ Will play with it for a bit and see how good it is! Anyways, good news for us ST folks~

http://www.skyteam.com/en/your-trip/...orld-Planner/#

I am VERY impressed by how well this looks and works!

After creating your itin it even stores it *somewhere*, for further use later on. The only thing missing is..pricing information.

Silverlight? An incompatible technology that even microsoft has discontinued?! :rolleyes:

A noun may be incompatible with another noun. So you allege Silverlight is incompatible with what, specifically?

True, that's my first feeling too. If it could give us a quote, we could save time contacting agents or airlines and going back to make changes... But at least the interface is looking great~ Worth the wait

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; it) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.246 Mobile Safari/534.1+)

With anything else but Windows up to 7. It is not available at all on iPads, tablets and mobiles, it sucks on Macs, and it is unavailable for Linux platforms.

Merrily, it will also be incompatible with Windows8 and the next generation of Explorer.

A great idea, all in all.

I just read this on delta.com. Very good news.

Th tools is great, though it fails at the last stage - any information when or whether they will add the possibility to book through the site or at least online?

Well ...

... I used it today.

Yes, it gave me a schedule and showed me how many miles it covered.

Yes, it saved the itenerary and gave me an itinerary number: RTW-******.

Then I followed the instructions and contacted the booking agent (I chose KLM). The booking agent had no record of this RTW number. She was happy to put the schedule in for me, but of course that defeats the object of having done it via the online planner.

She then told me that it had to go to someone in ticketing to do a calculation, and, as it is Saturday (no one available apparently), I would not hear back till around Thursday of next week.

She also told me I could pay wih miles or money, but not with a mix of the two.

On the basis of this, whilst the tool may look ok, it is not actually much use and nor is the service. I wonder if it would be the same with a different ST member?

Considering that FB may have the best IT in SkyTeam (not saying much), I cringe to think how awful the experience would be calling DL.

I work at the RTW Desk at Delta. We have a special email that you enter it into and we can get it setup on our end, once you have saved it online.

Jwhuffman

I tried this new tool last night also. No go. It kept telling me on my 11th flight that the max # of flights is 16 and I have 17!.

In the last two months, I have tried twice with AF/KL to get a RTW price in C. Both times they put the itin into the system and it showed up in "my bookings", but never a price. Even after 3 more calls from AF/KL and a re-input (the original dates had passed) I still have no price.

Same thing happened again with a "See America" pass. First they rang me to tell me that the itin didn't qualify for an RTW pricing because I only go to two zones. Then after I got them straightened out that this was a "See America" pass itin and not RTW, they made changes and said they would get back to me. Still waiting and that was a month ago!

8 years plat and Blue Bizz client. Great service....NOT. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they can't even be bothered to make money.

I think I may have an explanation for this, not that it excuses the issue.

If you try to enter, say, BHX-SFO, as far as you are concerned that is one leg of your trip. In fact, the flights may be (just guessing) something like BHX-AMS-YYZ-SFO. This is 3 legs. The BHX-AMS leg is definite for KLM, so there would be at least 2 legs.

I have no problem with it being 3 legs, but the system shows it as one (as far as I can tell). Hence you think you have 10 flights and you actually have 16!

Would my explanation seem to do it? Not very satisfactory anyway.

Edit
Just tried it. I think my explanation is correct. When you use the tool, the destinations you choose are shown on the left, and the schedule you choose appears here in the correct order. You have to look at the bottom (small type) which indicates the number of segments. In an example I used, it appeared as if I had 4 legs from the left hand information. This was indicated as 8 segments at the bottom.
My example was:
BHX-DXB-MEL-ATL-BHX.

It's works... but compared to the Star Alliance RTW tools it needs a lot of work.

Hell yes ! Too bad you can't purchased the RTW on line.

Currectly in France but planned a RTW from abroad, I think I'm gonna be in trouble tmr to get the itinerary ticketed by AF...

Beside the first leg will be with KQ, AF can take care of it, right ?

Good luck guys

I'm sure they can

Silverlight :td::td::td::td::td::td::td::td::td::td::td::td:

As I'm planning a RTW trip for January 2012, I tried it and also played with the RTW tools of the other two alliances. I must say they're similar but the ST tool is better. ^

up to 30% discount on RTW... but from where?
 

Yesterday ST launched a promotion with up to 30% off RTW fares but, as others have already pointed out, the online planner doesn't give fare information and, with this new offer ranging from 10 to 30% off depending on point of origin, I can see no info anywhere as to which origins are getting the biggest discounts.

Obviously the exact price changes with the route because of taxes and surcharges etc., but from what I recall over the last few years ST has *never* published a list of the base fare from each origin so you don't even an idea of whether it's cheap or not. The last time I tried booking something with ST it was 26,000 origin CAI and I went into the CAI office in Cairo, relevant person wasn't there, managed to get an email but after sending them my carefully worked out itinerary was eventually told that 26,000 mile itinerary isn't available starting in CAI... and yet that information doesn't appear to be published anywhere either :confused:

It just seems to me that ST want to make it as difficult as possible for me to find out even what ticket is available for sale, let alone what price it is, and thus they (sadly, because I quite like a number of their individual carriers) lose my business...

Wow just found out about this!

Will definitely give it a whirl and see how it goes! Thanks for the info!

Is it me?
 

Greetings:

I have been playing with the new RTW tool......can't get it to show me anything??? Is it me, is it the tool, yes/no/maybe?:D

Thanks,

Can't wait to try this out, now that so many carriers are joining skyteam!

I used the promotion for an upcoming trip AMS-LAX-LAS-LAX-ICN-DXB-AMS in December in C (or rather Z). Fare is 4999 euros, maximum of 15 segments and 24K miles. US Segments booked in Y with upgrade requested.

it took almost 10 days elapsed and 3 callbacks with KLM to get the booking made.

this application was made with an extra serving of failsauce.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21650537/fail.png

Wait, I thought the promotion only allowed 5 stops, or am I confused with something else?

Possible. The stops in LAX are connections and not stop-overs. She did mention 15 segments to me when I enquired about conditions.

Why does it show dots on the map that are not valid stops?


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21650537/more-fail.png


Well, I finally got it to produce some result. Even though I had to pick specific dates and flights, it can't be bothered to give me an exact or at least ballpark price? If it was a different of $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 depending on days and flights a lot of people might be inclined to take that 6am flight on tuesday instead of the 3pm flight on wednesday, etc.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21650537/rtw.png

AFAIK, Skyteam RTW fares don't vary depending on days/flights. The fare is a fixed amount, according to a) country of departure, and b) maximum total mileage (eg: 24,000 miles, for the special promotion). The RTW fare maps into a specific fare-class (which varies from airline to airline), and then either that fare-bucket is available on the day/flight you want (in which case you get the RTW ticket at the listed price), or it isn't (and you can't get the ticket at all).

For example, suppose you want to fly SVO to IST on SU, and the Skyteam RTW fare-class in economy on SU is, say, Q. So, if the Q fare-bucket is available, you can get the ticket; and if it isn't, you can't (even if higher fare-buckets are available). The same applies for all segments in the itinerary - if they are all available in the appropriate fare-class, you can get the ticket; if any one isn't, then you can't.

At least, this is how it used to work (Skyteam RTW publication from June 2008). It seems Skyteam no longer publish the fare rules for their RTW tickets, so it's difficult to know for sure...

I used the Skyteam tool (yes, it sucks) to plan this route at the 24,000 mile tier, which is the lowest and therefore least expensive mileage tier: ATL-LOS(connection only)-NBO-BKK-NRT-HON-LAX-ATL. As others here have experienced, despite saving the itinerary AND emailing it per the instructions, when I called Skyteam they couldn't find any record of it. But they helped reconstruct it. Anyway, the end result was a quote for US$3799.37 in Economy. What do you people think? Seems like a good deal to me.

An incidental question that I cross-posted over on the credit card branch: If I book this through Skyteam on my Delta AMEX Gold, would I get double miles the same way I would on a ticket booked directly from Delta? (It's not possible to book the Skyteam RTW ticket directly through DL--when I called DL, they transferred me to Skyteam.)

By way of background, our original plans involved only Nairobi and Bangkok, but once we priced out some tickets from Atlanta we figured we should look into a RTW. I've never been to Japan, so maybe now is the time to spend a few days in Tokyo and then relax in Hawaii before returning home.