Thanks! ... Any more Award Itineraries out there?
 

A belated THANK YOU to Jaimito Cartero & kiam. Your responses were right on the mark and very helpful.

Jaimito, your itinerary looks awesome! It looks like your six destinations were SYD, BKK, CAI, CPH, EZE and SJO with < 24 hour international stopovers in ICN 2x, CDG, AMS 2x, and MXP.

A couple of questions. Did you consider going to AKL? Did you consider a stopover in NRT rather than one ICN?

Would this trip be viable during summer months (in the northen hemisphere)?

Fortunately, I am planning months in advance of trying to book these. I'm also willing to put in some work to try to solve this puzzle.

Also, does anyone else have a ticketed Award Itinerary that you are willing to share?

My revised itinerary has just been ticketed a few days back. So this is the final one !!!

May BKK-CDG on AF
May CDG-CAI on AF (1st stop)
June CAI-CDG on AF
June CDG-JNB on AF (2nd stop)
June JNB-CDG on AF (3rd stop)
July CDG-EZE on AF (4th stop)
July EZE-ATL on DL
July ATL-BWI on DL (5th stop)
July IAD-SEA-ANC on AS (6th stop)
Aug ANC-SEA on AS
Aug SEA-ICN on KE
Aug ICN-BKK on KE

Used 220K miles, Business Class all the way (of course except US domestic, they are First). KVS Tool really helped me a lot on this...especially on those AF (O Class) and AS (A class) award seats availability.

Cool but misguided KLM tool?
 

After reading this thread and Ralf's help (thanks!) I checked out KLM fancy RTW Map here. The map, which I know is not authoritative (check out Continental's old logo...), shows flights from PEK to CKG (Chongqing) which is where I need to get to! But it doesn't really seem to be served by any of the airlines it claims to be using. Anyone have any idea? My travel agent is a bit on the lazy side ("only SkyTeam with KLM" - even after showing her the web snippet!).

Take care,
Arie

You're right on the money for my destinations. I have tweaked it a bit, and decided to go to South Africa instead of CAI. I haven't booked my last two real stops, since I want to take the first few legs before I go through the "ordeal" again.

I've stayed in Tokyo before, so that was my primary reason to go through ICN (Plus I'm taking Korean, so it's almost mandatory). I have no NW segments in my NW award.

I have no idea on summer inventory. I'd shy away from it myself, since I know that would be the hardest time to do it.

Fare Classes for RTW Rewards
 

I've started the process of planning my RTW honeymoon vacation. I made my initial call to the CO rewards desk and got a fantastic rep who was able to give me some rather useful information regarding the fare classes and booking process.

First, it seems that each ST partner has their own way of putting together the RTW rewards. For instance, CO allows you to use VS, TP and AS as their partner airlines, even though they are not part of ST. I would assume that NW would probably let you use MH. DL might let you use El Al. I'm sure there are more. Certainly this makes things a bit more confusing from a planning perspective, but since most of us only have enough miles for the RTW on one carrier, at least we know which set of partners we're going to be using.

The other thing that the rep was able to give me was the fare classes for the various airlines that CO uses as their partners. These are the fare classes for the First/BusinessFirst reward. He said it would vary between 220K and 280K miles depending on which carriers/class things book in, but I'm assuming that this is the 280K trip.
CO - E
CO Operated by 2V/BE/DL/DM/CM - E
CM - G
DL - R
NW - W
VS - G
AS - W
KL - W
KL Operated by NW/EK - D
AF - O
UX - Z
OK - Z
AZ - Z
BE - C
KE - D
TP - I

Those are all the ones he had. Maybe on my next call I'll ask for the 140K coach booking codes and/or the codes for the paid tickets.

Anyone have any good suggestions for tools to help figure out the availability of these fare buckets? I'm guessing that I'm going to be subscribing to the KVS tool for a month or so to help with my planning, but I'm up for any other suggestions.

The one thing I learned is that 50% of what they tell you is incorrect. I would never have your plans set in stone until you have the tickets in your hand. Maybe you'll get lucky and find the agent that really knows their stuff, but I have yet to encounter such person (at least at NWA).

I really *wish* that I could ticket on MH for the NWA Skyteam award. That would make it much easier. They stick to the Skyteam members only strictly for these award tickets.

The First Class award is probably a bit of a mileage waster, since you won't be able to get such an award on many of the segments.

Do keep us up to date on what you actually ticket. I find that if you can get it ticketed, you're usually fine. When it's sent to the rate desk is when it's often kicked back.

Well, he was reading directly from the rules on the screen, and I know that someone else recently reported being able to use an AS segment on a DL reward.

As for booking in F or J, I want CO BF since I think that most of my long haul at the beginning is going to be there. I may end up in NW or DL domestic F headed to Hawaii on the outbound. I know that it is a "waste" of miles, but I have a lot, and it is my honeymoon. May as well use them now!

Each airline website should have its own link (well, at least for Delta) that provides info of what airlines they will consider eligible to be a part of their RTW (either paid tickets or awards). For Delta RTW, Alaska Airline is the only one airline out of SkyTeam Alliance that is a part of RTW tickets.

Here are the award classes for Delta and its partners.

Airlines Economy Business First
AeroMexico U C —
Air France X O A
Air Jamaica U D E
Alaska Airlines W — A
Alitalia U Z —
Avianca Z A —
China Airlines S O E
China Southern Z I —
Continental G — E
Czech Airlines E Z —
El Al R X —
Emirates X D Z
KLM W D Z
Korean Air U D A
Malaysia T I R
Northwest W D A
Singapore X I O
South African U D P
Virgin Atlantic T G —

And from what I know these booking classes (for all SkyTeam airlines + Alaska Airlines) apply to both regular award seats and RTW award seats.

Well, I think much of the confusion has to do with normal awards and RTW awards. I've only done one award, so I don't consider myself an expert on the topic, but it can be stressful getting these suckers ticketed. What will work on a normal award might not work with a Skyteam RTW.

Again, let us know how it's going with ticketing, and your sucesses and failures and such. :)

taxes on a Delta award RTW?
 

Booked and ticketed our upcoming (Jan 21) RTW in april 2005. Paid about $200 in taxes. No problem. Since I ticketed, we have had flight changes and even one flight canceled and rebooked with another airline. The question is who pays for the additional taxes when I finally get them repaper ticketed right before we leave? Anyone know?? None of the changes were requested by us, they were all just scheduel changes and flight cancellations by the airlines. :confused: :confused:

So I finally got it booked. I was unable to use the VS segment HKG-LHR. The rep wasn't sure if that was a route that CO never can book on, or if it was because of the RTW award. I managed to get the AF HKG-CDG instead, so no big deal. The other interesting one was that flying from Paris to Greece is disallowed as backtracking (on a westbound routing). A little annoying, but we reworked our schedule to visit the cities in order and it seems to be OK.

The one other thing that was a bit surprising to me is that CO won't let their Platinum Elites book into their dedicated PLT inventory for the RTW reward. So instead of finding the EG seats we had to find E on all the CO operated flights. It screwed up a couple of our routes, adding a couple of segments to route around the availability issues, but, again, it all worked out. And it only took an hour and 45 minutes to find all the flights. The CO PLT reservation desk was supremely helpful in making this work.

Here's the routing we're going to do:
EWR-CO-NRT
NRT-NW-SPN
SPN-CO-GUM
GUM-CO-ROR
ROR-CO-GUM
GUM-CO-HKG
HKG-AF-CDG
CDG-AZ-MXP
MXP-AZ-ATH
ATH-AZ-FCO
FCO-AZ-CDG
CDG-AF-JFK

We only have three weeks to make the trip, so this was about as much as we could handle as far as different stops and destinations.

Seth.

Here's mine
 

Here's mine:

SAV DL ATL
ATL-DL-NRT
NRT-Bullet Train-KIX
KIX-NW-TPE
TPE-KL-BKK
BKK-KL-AMS
AMS-KL-OSL
OSL-KL-AMS
AMS-KL-GOT
GOT-KL-AMS
AMS-KL-BRS
BRS-KL-TLV
TLV-AZ-FCO
FCO-AZ-CDG
CDG-AF-JNB
JNB-AF-CDG
CDG-DL-ATL
ATL-DL-SAV

23 days, 38K+ miles

I'd guess yours was done through DL, given the beginning and ending segments.

The told me that I wasn't allowed any open jaws on my award. I was a bit surprised to see the NRT x bullet x KIX segments.

I'm on the CDG-AF-JNB myself. When are you going? I'd like some interesting things to do there, or perhaps to go to CPT.

Based on this routing, it looks like you are stopping in NRT/KIX, TPE and/or BKK (or just connecting), OSL, GOT, TLV, JNB and maybe CDG on the way home.

I had all sorts of issues booking mine with the "must travel in one direction" rule, where I couldn't visit Athens after Paris. You seem to be visiting Tel Aviv after your Scandanavia tour. Is this really a valid RTW routing??

S.

Yes it is valid. Skyteam considers TLV to be a part of Europe. Backtracking within a continent is allowed with Skyteam, but I have heard it is not allowed on some other alliances. I've done these trips before and had very little trouble in booking the itinerary, except for keeping the milage under 39,000. Knowing which eligible carriers fly which routes is very helpful in guiding the agent to an acceptable solution.