It appears changing the dates of the flight is fine but then the ticket has to be revalidated to show the changes and that means it has to be reissued--what a hassle. Of course reissue fee applies!! There seems to be more obstacles put on making this business seamless than the other way around.

Not sure who is telling you this, I just did a date change at no fee.

My TA keeps insisting that a date change means "reissue" on RTW tickets (in my case, OW xONEx which has free date & flight changes). I keep saying "no", its a not a reissue etc etc. I don't think the TA understands the jargon. Not to worry really, as they are too expensive with fees and provide no substantial intellectual input to the process (I have done most of it). I'll take the business elsewhere next time. Its not worth the hassle to use my AMEX card to trigger insurance that is substandard.

I have no idea about OW rules, I suggest you ask on that forum.

I'm not asking about OW rules, I'm simply adding comment about the general confusion in terminology.

You are absolutely right in saying that revalidating and reissuing are two different things! Unfortunately, with e-tickets you often don't have a choice which of the two can or has to be done. With a paper ticket you could simply show it. When the booked and ticketed dates differed you could still use it as it was if the fare did not bear a change fee. Nowadays, the e-ticket and the reservation must somehow match for the check-in agent to be able to find the ticket. Revalidating is a good way to achieve this, but if the issuing airline is different from the one operating the changed segment it usually is impossible to revalidate. Some airlines even prohibit revalidating their own tickets! When you run into a situation like this there is no way around reissuing the ticket. Whether that incurrs a fee depends on who does it. If it happened in my agency I would call the issuing airline and ask whether they could waive the reissue fee because as per the fare rules it does not apply. If the airline agreed I would reissue the ticket for free, but that's because I am a nice person. If some other agent charges a small handling fee for that I'd find that acceptable. Few things in life are free...

* RTW fare rules provide for date/flight changes (assuming same carrier and route) for no charge. Your TA wanting to charge you is a different matter. if your TA does charge, you may want to switch TA's or instead book with your preferred carrier, who will not charge you for these type of changes.

Thanks for the clarification and background to the process behind what I thought was TA confusion. Seems further reason to stick with the issuing agent for changes rather than going to the nearest alliance carrier (be it OW or *A) and taking pot luck that they can make things happen.

Absolutely! And I can give you even one more reason: If many airlines are involved so are probably many different reservation systems. In that case the airlines can't see each others reservations even though they appear in the ticket. This makes it difficult for them to change the booking and reissue the ticket. The TA might have booked and ticketed your flights on Galileo, but the airlines you are flying are using Amadeus and Sabre. The "big picture" is only viewable in the Galileo master PNR whereas each airline sees only its own fraction of your flights. Therefore it is best to have the TA keep control over the whole thing.

I did it once with NZ on a F-RTW to catch a flight just 2 hours earlier. They messed it up (insisting on reissue but without fee, change of PNR+tix number) completely. It took me days to sort that out for the rest of the itin afterwards and of course an additional 30 min at check-in before every single following flight on that itin ("Sir, you are not booked on that flight").
Lesson learned.

This is my major gripe about RTW tickets. Twice I have had problems when changing the date or the time of a flight in a RTW itinerary. The first time, Thai (the issuing airline) said they could not re-validate the ticket because I had finished my flights with them and they no longer had access to the ticket. The second time (also ticketed through Thai), I skipped Thai altogether and made the change through the UA 1K line. The agent "took over" the ticket and rebuilt it, but it was so messed up that it took me an hour to check in for one of my flights. The availability of changing an itinerary free of charge is one of the selling points of RTW tickets for me. The process of making small changes, however, seems unnecessarily complicated.

Agree, but this isn't just a *A problem. OW has it far worse, IMO.

It is all a result of e-tickets yet the various GDS are not fully compatible (and no alliance yet has all their airlines on a single GDS). Back when we were allowed paper tickets, it was much easier to make changes that stuck.

I just finished a *A RTW tour and had no problem changing both the route and dates of some of my flights. Ticket was issued through LH and when I called it was a very simple process to get the new flights booked (I did my homework checking availability) and after a few hours received the new itinerary via e-mail.

And it wasn't just for LH flights but also NZ and OZ. No problems checking in either, even reserving seats just after receiving the e-mail conformation.

So it can be done :-).

Of course, it can be done easily with this scenario. You orginally booked with LH, they have control over the complete booking, and they can change everything in it. Piece of cake. Problems arise when you want to change directly with one of the other airlines involved. That will most likely mess things up heavily!

And why would you want to do that? I made the booking via the *A book-and-fly tool and LH issued the ticket. But only a small number of the flights were with LH....
I don't care who issues the ticket and who I have to call for changes, as long as it is being done correctly (and one change was within 24hrs from calling). So why would I want to contact each airline separatly?