Hi everyone

My Dad is looking at taking a *A RTW trip for a year in J; originally he planned to buy a series of one ways until I showed him the light! Sadly I'm a OW person, so this is all a bit foreign to me. What I have gathered is that it's far better for him to start in Japan, so have put together this itinerary for him so far:

Tokyo - Dehli - Istanbul - Zurich - London - Sao Paulo - Buenos Aires - Santiago - xLima - Cuzco - Lima - Panama - Toronto - Vancouver - Tokyo.

As long as I get the flights _just_ right, this just scrapes in under 29k, with 16 segments, for a price of 823,110 JPY. It seems the Panama - Toronto are seasonal. Vancouver to Tokyo are also annoying, I can't seem to get rid of the airplane surcharge.

As you can probably guess, South and Central America are big parts of this trip. Eastern Canada, he'll spend a bit of time in. Cuba was a must do; I'm thinking we can change Panama for Havana as long as we go through an agent or something else. Machu Picchu is another must do, hence the Cuzco detour. He's also going to Nepal from Dehli, and a bunch of internal Europe etc etc.

Any bright ideas as to further optimisation? I know the Cuzco is a bit of a side trip, and uses up some sectors, but it seems prices to there are pretty high if you're not Peruvian. Any other "expensive" places that we'd be better including on this itinerary?

Last question (promise!) ... he's a SQ silver member, and was planning on working on that. However, I thought he might be better joining up to Aegean or similar for this trip, as he'll get gold easily. Thoughts? He intends to fly J the rest of his life so lounge issue probably isn't an issue; I'm more looking for optimal earn/burn rates.

Cheers!

If by better you mean cheaper.... then you might be right. Japan is one of the countries where the start of an *A RTW is priced lower than in most other countries. However there are some others, like in Africa, that might also work. It mostly depends on your expenses for positioning yourself and what you will do with the segments at the end of the RTW.

I assume you have found the book-and-fly tool on the *A website where you can easily play with different routes?

To avoid the AC surcharge you could do Calgary-Tokyo instead, although not sure if that pushes the itinerary over the 29K limit. Play with the book-and-fly tool.

Yes that's been my home for a couple of weeks! That's how I've managed to put together that itinerary so far.

Calgary is a good thought, I'll have a play with that.

The tool is a good way to spend quite a few hours :-).

There are flights from Bogota (BOG) to YYZ on AC. I doubt they are seasonal (they are operating now). I recently found this for someone who wanted to avoid going through the US to get from Colombia to Japan.

The only other way to get from Latin America to Japan if you want to avoid the US is Aeromexico and they are not in *A.

Both Avianca and Copa fly BOG to Havana. And Copa from Panama City but you obviously know that.

In typical form, my Dad has changed his mind and thinks that's too much to cram into 12 months So I'm back to the drawing board, somewhat!

Oh well. I'll just keep clicking destinations and dreaming