The Eureka! Moment
 

Planning a RTW can drive you nuts. If you're like me, you're trying to achieve 4 or 5 different things in a RTW: visit some key places, travel on the airlines/flights that you want, accrue enough miles for a specific elite status, and of course stay within both the maximum mileage and the RTW rules.

It's a killer process. You find a routing to get enough miles for * Gold, but you're 126 miles over the 29k limit. So you change some things around, but you'd have to fly United in F instead of ANA. You go back to the drawing board, change a few cities, put in some short hops to get yourself enough status miles while staying under the 29k limit ... and then you discover that you've gone through Frankfurt 4 times instead of the max 3.

It's enough to drive you batty. You spend days, weeks, trying different routings that might -- but do not -- work.

And then late at night, for no particular reason, you realize that you can put those little flights in a totally different part of the trip, a part of the trip that you'd never thought about. Instead of Frankfurt, you can take some shuttles back and forth between BOS and LGA. Next morning, you open up Excel, and the numbers work.

That, my friends, is the Eureka! moment.

Well done. I know exactly what you've been going through. I recently managed to rejig a RTW I'd been working on to get exactly 39,000 miles after having some problems re-optimising following an additional "must do" destination being added.

PS - I find tweaking intra-europe to bounce between FRA, MUC & ZRH (and even ZAG or LJU or VIE) helps with those little flights that get 2500 miles each (if crediting to M&M and have FTL or SEN status).

And then, after countless hours of fiddle-jigging to get it 'perfect', one of the "must do" destinations will be scratched; e.g., the meeting in Dubai cancelled allowing a non-stop FRA-SIN and throwing 250 miles back into the RTW pot for still more creative tweaking! (<- my latest challenge).

cheers,

Henry

And then there is the worry that GreatCircleMapper might not give the right mileage so all those assumptions are wasted...

By this stage in the process one is well past the rough-and-ready GCM; it's either the *ARTWMC or a rate desk that's providing the numbers.

cheers,

Henry

One of th cruelest gotchas came when I thought all was perfect, until realizing that, going for M&M status as Kiwi Flyer suggests, I had calculated status miles for an ANA flight using the 25% SEN bonus ... a bonus that does not apply on NH flights. Easily enough rectified, in that instance.

I cannot imagine how anyone can actually plan a *A RTW without Excel. It would be like calculating a square root using pencil and paper.

Agree with henry999 that the GCM is useful only for a general idea of validity. The difference between the *A and GCM mileages can be huge -- probably as much as 100 miles or more on a complete trip. I do have to use the GCM figure for surface segments that *A doesn't fly, but haven't run into trouble with that ... yet.

The *A RTWMC is usually very close to the numbers in Amadeus, much more reliable than the GCM, except of course for direct flights with a stop where it always calculates the point to point mileage rather than the nonstop distance. The *A RTWMC does include surface sectors in the total mileage, but of course does not show the mileage amount.

Google Earth
 

I've been planning an RTW *A trip as well. The *A RTW planner provides miles, which I hope are accurate. I've not heard of the GCM tool, but in order to get exact mileage, I crack open Google Earth, and use the path tool to chart point to point (great circle is always used in measurements).

Moreover, I zoom in and select the middle of the longest looking runway as my start/end point. If not exact, it's got to be pretty close in mileage.

Eric

I know that feeling too well also. The 39,000 mile routing is about the 5th or 6th iteration as my plans/needs keep changing :(