I tried to book a round the world itinerary today, but KLM informed me that as of June 10 they stopped selling RTW tickets. I could not find any info about this online. It's a bit annoying, since I spent three weeks getting everything aligned, and only now they tell me...

Does anybody have any decent ideas on how I can reasonably book the following itinerary for July/August in business class?
AMS -> [HIB] -> BNE -> [CBR] -> [JOG] -> MPL -> AMS

HIB/CBR/JOG are work destinations, I figured BNE would be fun to visit; but that could easily be anything else, preferably in a timezone not too many hours away, so I can work on my jet lag there.

Obviously instead of CBR one could read SYD or MEL, and I'll just book a quick round-trip ticket on Qantas/whatever.

Anybody have any decent tips on how I can stick with Skyteam? Have all partners given up on RTW or is it only KLM?

You’d better ask your question in the SkyTeam forum, where there is a thread dedicated to RTW tickets, although it has not been active for quite a while with Covid. You can ask the Moderators to move your post there.

Any decent travel agent can book this for you. Direct them to http://www.skyteam.com/en/business-s...-world-planner

You may have to rely on adding some additional sectors of your own to hit some of those workplaces. There is no Skyteam service to Canberra, as the most obvious example; but you can clearly and easily find your own separate ticket to get to/from there. Qantas flights even earn XPs on Flying Blue now; alternatively you may even be able to book a BNE-CBR-BNE/SYD/MEL/wherever your exit point from AU is on your RTW ticket, using FB miles.

JOG may also be problematic as it would probably require a certain amount of backtracking to DPS/CGK here, again, I might suggest that organising a separate ticket to do JOG as a sidetrip from your RTW ticket may be advisable/required.

The same may apply to HIB. But here again you could easily add a sidetrip to/from MSP

MPL looks like it may be problematic, too. It either requires you to connect via AMS (which you cannot do, as you cannot travel west beyond your origin once you gave returned from the East) or via PAR (which again moves you beyond your origin again).

An RTW doesn't give you carte blanche on the points you can visit; there are restrictions on the number of times you can connect from the same airport (particularly when it is the origin and destination) and the direction of travel; AMS-CDG-MPL-CDG-MSP would probably the only way to include it in your suggested routing, I.e. at the start, not at the end

Hi

not just KL but entire skyteam stopped selling RTW tickets

You will be better booking it by yourself with help of google flights and ITA matrix

Even can be cheaper than ST RTW as you can mix it with non skyteam airlines

It's very, very unlikely that any online agency would use the rules and fare basis underpinning the various choices available for RTW tickets....unless it's a shopfront for an RTW specialist, like https://tripplanner.airtreks.com/

If you can find this itinerary for less than the advised price for Skyteam RTW fares, then great! But I really, really doubt a self-made itinerary would come anywhere close to the fares available for specific RTW tickets.

But it may indeed be that Skyteam no longer offers RTW fares (oneworld and *A still appear to do so).

Get a decent travel agent.

Just for explanation , i never mentionned any agency , as i said OP could probably organise it by himself/herself doing homework (that include what terms and conditions are offered by ST RTW compared to self managed RTW) and depends of course of flexibility and budget

Thats the point you missed when i said about non skyteam airlines , if OP can find some flights for 2 or 3 times cheaper than ST flights and it fits the requirements then there is a choice . if few segments are done with non skyteam airlines i doubt it will be a big deal

if TA can help and offer something OP cant then it is also a good idea

Agreed, understood, and not misinterpreted by me; my point was that there are "special" RTW fares which are far more attractive than stitching together flights in the manner that any "normal" online booking tool would do, so to get the benefit of the huge reductions on offer by booking using a specific RTW fare, you can't just turn to the internet. You'd need some form of specialist website or travel agent.


I didn't miss the point; however, the cheapest fares for any such itinerary are the special RTW fares filed by the alliances and which simply can't be matched by patching together individual flights using "normal" fares.

I did a streamlined version of the OP's itinerary, in the Star Alliance RTW planner, and using Google Flights selecting the absolute cheapest fare on whatever carrier (involving some awful connections and long layovers) between the same stopovers on the same dates; the RTW fare is almost €2.5k cheaper.

The old Skyteam RTW planner is indeed gone from the website, so I am strongly suspecting that Skyteam no longer files any fares that can be used to stitch together a "cheap" RTW ticket. With Skyteam, you are likely to be relying on the cheapest one-way point-to-point fares which will be far more expensive than the old RTW fare would have been.

Indeed, I did find the Star Alliance RTW planner; and if I replace HIB by MSP, and manually add a CGK->JOG side trip, that would work.

I kept JOG in that RTW planner first, and it kept saying 'no connection'. There really appear to not be too many flights available.

I tried calling the Amex Platinum travel center, but they no longer offer any ticket bookings.
The KLM Personal Assistance line was ook no overly enthusiastic about helping out.

I will try Air France first, since they indicated to my parents that they still offer RTW fares on Skyteam + some Qantas flights.

If that does not work, I guess I'll just have to make a call to Lufthansa.

The wikipedia entry for any airports tends to have a list of airlines/routes. Some are now not up to date due to the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisbane_Airport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_Airport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adisutjipto_Airport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_Regional_Airport

Oneworld alliance have several RTW product
As above QF & AF/KLM are frequent flyer partners, including some codeshares

The KLM/QF code share does not really work easy. Every time I have gone to CBR in the past couple of years I have had to book my flights on klm.com to go to SYD/MEL/BNE and then book a separate domestic flight to CBR. The KLM site does not know of Canberra, or of many domestic flights. Despite them saying differently.

I have had lounge access once with my platinum status, but that was because the Qantas lady in SYD was being nice to me; this was basically Feb 28 2020, so right as covid was starting.

Air France now says that they still offer Round the World tickets, but only if you book them completely on Air France operated flights, and no more cooperation with Qantas.

which is absolutely impossible...

I ended up just skipping the entire RTW idea. I'm now doing three separate trips. AMS -> HIB, AMS->CGK, and AMS->CBR.

A lot more hours on airplanes, but a lot cheaper. Which is always amazing to see.

Thanks for the responses; sorry for not responding sooner.

You really should have asked the AF person who told you that to start booking your desired itinerary...