AH-64D

I am giving my nephew a Skyteam Around The World Award using Delta Skymiles 220K award for his college graduation. I am looking for the longest trip with the most cities since he has a month to do it. All suggestion are welcome and appreciated.

orix

Where will he be departing from? Does he have any likes/dislikes? Some flights within Thailand and SE Asia are quite affordable, and maybe he can buy some flights to explore that area. Same with Europe and the discount cariers.

Does he want to start out east bound or westbound? Also, when is he planning to travel?

This would help a lot in planning out an itinerary.

AH-64D

He will start at LAX and is open for any suggestion. He would like to hit the major international cities first since he only has 30 days. Domestically, he doesn't care too much since he can get there on his own by driving. TIA

leroy11

well, how about something like:
LAX - ATL (connect) - Cape Town (stopover) - CDG (connect) - LHR (use London as a base to explore Europe using Easyjet, Ryanair or try www.europebyair.com) - CDG (connect) - Bangkok (explorer Thailand - possibly Laos/Cambodia) - Seoul (connect) - Sydney (stopover) - Seoul (connect) - Sao Paulo (stopover) - LAX

leroy11

How about:
LAX-GRU (or wherever in S Am via ATL) - CDG - London- CDG - South Africa - CDG - Bangkok - Seoul - Sydney - Seoul - LAX

Track

Capetown is east of London, and Sao Paulo is east of Los Angeles, so on an eastbound trip this backtracking would not be allowed.

[This message has been edited by Track (edited 07-04-2002).]

[This message has been edited by Track (edited 07-04-2002).]

goldmedallionflyer

Here's the rules for a WT11/WT21 award ticket from the DL site (my emphasis in bold)
With this clearly stated, it is clear that back tracking thru a connection city is not permitted, so the multi-connects thru CDG and Seoul would not be permitted. Also note that the CDG-London would not be permitted since it tracks back in a westward direction while travelling east. I recommend an atlas be in hand when choosing your route to avoid back tracking.

Enjoy your BE trip! I have been planning to do just this for a few years now. Miles are in the bank for the two of us - it's just getting the free time to take a couple of weeks off and really enjoy the trip.

And when you're done travelling, please do write a trip report of your experience with the different airlines and cities

GMF

hfly

To my knowkedge it says the same for a paid ticket, but you can backtrack in order to make connections in N. America AND Europe.

Track

Backtracking is permitted to reach a connection city for an onward flight, provided you take the next plane to where you want to go, e.g., backtracking from South Africa to CDG is permitted to catch a flight to, say, Viet Nam, but you could not use Paris as one of your 6 permitted stopovers. If you work this out right, you could spend a day in a connection city and take a flight almost 24 hours later to some other place. When DL still had the Nagoya-LAX flight it was possible to fly from New Zealand via Seoul to Nagoya, spend a comfortable night in a hotel there and then continue on (just less than 24 hours later) to Los Angeles, rather than spend two nights on the plane (NZ-ICN and ICN-LAX).

Track

I was permitted a very minor divergence from the no-backtracking rule on my recent eastbound round-the-world trip. Because of peculiarities in AF's schedules I had to fly JFK-CDG-Rabat and Marrakech-CDG-Berlin, even though RAK is about 1 degree 18' west of RBA. The rules exist, but the DL round-the-world staff aren't inflexible. In fact they're great for helping arrange an itinerary.

arawal

I used AF for my Round the World trip and here was my itinerary - NY (JFK) --> Tokyo --> Seoul---> Bombay----> Delhi ----> Paris--> NY

If you are wondering why it so short - well, I got the award for only 14,000 miles as I found a mistake on their website and they decided to honor it (this was two years ago). So I had to book the dates and cities immediately and with such few miles I didn't mind where I went. Anyways, I found out all the rules and here is what happened:

I wanted to do Seoul ---> Sydney but they said that wasn't allowed as I would be going North - South (instead of West - East). SO I had to buy a separate ticket for that.

Backtracking is only allowed for NY, Europe connections. For example if you want to go from Moscow - Berlin - London - NY, you could do that even though you would have to connect through Paris each time (and thus backtrack). I wanted to go from Delhi - Cairo - NY but the backtracking rule applied there as there was no way to go from Delhi to Cairo without stopping through Paris and since Cairo was not a European or North American connection, the backtracking was not allowed.

Trust me, the Round the World trip itinerary planning is not as easy as it sounds. There will be so many dates where an award seat won't be available, connections which won't be valid, etc. Instead of surprising your nephew, you might as well just let him decide which cities he wants to see and how long he wants to spend in each city. He will be surprised enough by the award and I'm sure he'll appreciate being able to choose his own itinerary.

Hope this helps....

rb.sr

I am thinking about taking the 220 RTW award.
It would be great if others who have actually done the trip would post their routings (rather than speculating through rule interpretation).

The planning task is made more difficult by the lack of an actual route map on the AF site. I would like to visit their more exotic (i.e, expensive) destinations but do not know where else the plane might stop.

Also, how far in advance did you book?

arawal

I booked in March 2001 for travel in July 2001. I was able to get NY --> Tokyo (Delta), Tokyo --> Seoul (Korean Air) and Seoul --> Bombay (Korean air) without a problem. I travelled to Delhi on my own and bought tickets on Singapore Airlines from Delhi to Austrailia and Singapore (it wasn't too expensive from there). As I said before, getting Sydney through the RTW award wasn't possible because I would be going North - South.

When I got back to Delhi, I continued my RTW trip and went from Delhi --> Paris (AF). I wanted to go to Cairo but that was illegal routing as I would be going backwards from Paris --> Cairo.

The only problem I had was from my Paris --> NY segment. A lot of poeple from the US are vacationing in Europe and award seats are a problem But I eventually did get it for the date I required.

If you are going with the 240K award, I believe you are not bound by capacity restrictions, right? So you would not have problems with dates, only routes. Still if there is a cheaper award available with capacity controls, you should atleast take a look to see if you can get the dates your nephew wants - you'll be surprised that there would be award seats available when you least expect them.

Track

I went round the world on a business-class award in Feb.-April, 2002; I booked each segment 331 days before the flight and got everything except Puerto Vallarta-Mexico City, on which I had to fly economy class (even though first-class seats were empty):
JFK-CDG-Rabat/Marrakech-CDG-Berlin-CDG- Ho Chi Minh Ville (side trip to Cambodia)- ICN (side trip to Taipei)-Auckland-ICN-LAX- Mexico City-Puerto Vallarta-Mexico City-JFK. The last segment was interrupted because of a technical problem on the airplane, so I actually flew MEX-ATL (hotel and meal at DL expense)-LGA.

NoStressHere

Track:
Did you happen to write up a trip report on your journey? Looking to cash in a bunch of miles and take my honey on a RTW business class trip, probably in first quarter of 2003.

Any comments, hints, ideas post or email me.