Sale on Oneworld Explorer RTW fares

[Mattg]

Qantas is having a sale on round-the-world fares. Sale ends 31 October.

Round the World Ticket | Student Flights and Trips | Qantas

 

[snabbu]

These are essentially XONEx fares right?

 

[Mattg]

These are essentially XONEx fares right?

Correct. They are.

 

[RooFlyer]

Thanks for letting us know! (More than QF has done, in spite of being on all the advice e-mails).

I'm looking at this right now.

Cheers

 

[juddles]

Thanks for letting us know! (More than QF has done, in spite of being on all the advice e-mails).

I'm looking at this right now.

Cheers

As per rooflyer, I also struggle to get promo emails from QF - does anyone know how to sort this? I want to know specials from any continent to any continent - it seems each time I try to select the "get emails" from anywhere, it wipes any other selection.

Thanks to OP for post

 

[RooFlyer]

Just a bit more on this.

As I mentioned, I am currently looking at a OW Explorer RTW fare (in J) - so a DONEx. Using the OW planner, I found it very expensive - abt $15 for "five continents". (Interestingly, although you can fly to Europe on QF via Dubai ("Europe") and so not touch Asia, they still count Asia as a continent, so Australia-Europe-Nth America-Australia is 4 continents, not 3 .)

Interestingly, when I checked the fare tonight, I got a slightly cheaper fare (only abt $400) compared to what I got a few weeks ago - so the 'sale' calculation is probably using a certain set of airlines/conditions.

My itinerary called for me to go straight to the UK, then bounce around Europe a bit, then to Bermuda, then Florida, then bounce around the Caribbean a bit, then to Sth America and back home any way I could. This is neither work nor holiday, so I'm quite price sensitive.

Anyway I put the challenge to my TA to do better. I figured that by only doing long haul in J and shorter hops in Y, it would bring the price down a fair bit.

Results:

For April next year, using a Finnair ticket for long hauls (they have great combo deals and QF SYD-SIN), and including QF SCL-SYD, it came in at $8.8K for the long hauls in J, and $4.3K for 7 shorter hops in Y (incl Star Alliance where convenient).

Using a Lufthansa package for long hauls (ditto good combo deals and SQ SYD-SIN), and a mix of *A and AA for the shorter hops (and going back to LAX to get UA back home) long haul J was $7.3K and shorter Y legs $4.3K.

Now, this was not final pricing, just indicative, and not being careful to select airlines with lower fuel fines etc, but the differences may or may not be significant, depending how you read them.


OneWorld - saving $2K by flying economy on 7 flights, some of them quite long (eg BOG to SCL) - although cheaper, I'm not seeing a great saving overall.

Star Alliance - saving $3.5K for not quite the same configuration, but similar outcome to the OW option. This is a saving where I would consider it.

Take-away.
Their 'sale saving' for 5 continents in J is $1,300 out of $15.6K; worth having, but I can certainly do much better by a TA doing some creative planning and sacrificing a few short hauls into Y. And I suspect they are a bit selective when choosing their 'normal Vs sale' comparison. For most of us it'll be less, maybe much less. Also, by doing the AY/LH long haul deal, I can probably get quite a few of the shorter legs on Award tickets, saving more.

Other ways to skin this cat as well of course.

 

[snabbu]

Informative post RF, just goes to show how a good TA can be cost effective if they know what they are doing.

 

[RooFlyer]

Informative post RF, just goes to show how a good TA can be cost effective if they know what they are doing.

And to illustrate this, I forgot to add that they (with no prompting from me) looked at reversing the order of my Nth/Sth American travels by having me fly direct to Bogotá from Frankfurt on LH and then working my way north, and found it was $1,000 less again. So abt $10.5K for the LH option, which I reckon is pretty good and I'm willing to suffer whY for a few hours!

 

[kevinkhchan]

...but I can certainly do much better by a TA doing some creative planning...

I couldn't agree more. The TA I use thrives on the challenge. Even let me in on some possible options to consider for future travels (one involves an interesting ticketing option with CX).

 

[RooFlyer]

My TA has been doing some more on this.

First, as of this morning (Wednesday), QR nor AY have loaded their special fares into the system, so you currently won't see the sale fares if you have those airlines in the itinerary. The TA got them to quote manually for the itinerary I'm looking at.

OneWorld Explorer fares book in D class and sale price before taxes etc for 4 continents is A$10,999 Vs $11,999 previously.

Global Explorer is also on sale (not mentioned on the QF web page); they book into 'I' class, so less availability that 'D'. 26K mile sale fare before tax $9,900 Vs $10,499 before.

TA is still sharpening the pencil.

 

[Jacksond]

Do people think it best to use a recommended TA for around the world. I'm planning a possible trip LA to Salt Lake to NYC and back via France/England. Most probably Sept/Oct next year.
It would be a mixture of J on long hops and Y on the shorter trips. I can never get the around world options to work on the airline web sites. I don't think I would fly Th again. The Melb-Bankock and reverse were terrible on those old 777's.

 

[RooFlyer]

Readers of this forum will know that I am a fan of travel agents - but mine is very experienced and has been working with me for years and knows my likes and dislikes - and will put the work in as they know I am a regular customer, with a decent spend.

The J long hops and Y shorter trips on a RTW was exactly what I was doing when I first saw this thread. I have now two RTW J quotes which are very competitive (one a Finnair RTW and the other Lufthansa based) and then a bunch of separately ticketed Y short hops radiating out from the RTW stop-over points; not booked yet, so I may try to get Award flights on some of those. Overall much cheaper than the web based RTW quotes, and not just because I'm eliminating short J trips.

TAs can see deals and opportunities that you won't working with airline web sites - such as cross alliance combos like AY and LH offer. And of course they save heaps of time - although for many here the 'hunt' is part of the fun.

If you go to a TA don't expect them to spend ages tinkering with every aspect you want them to look at - they have no guarantee that you'll book and spend with them until you actually do it. First, scope out the itinerary you want to do yourself - know the basic options and give them the framework. Then, be very specific about the type of flights you want - is it cheapest (which may have coughpy connections, and red-eyes), is it using certain airlines (or excluding some) or do they have to be done in a specific order? I'd ask for maybe two alternatives - dirt cheapest and most convenient.

 

[JohnM]

Readers of this forum will know that I am a fan of travel agents - but mine is very experienced and has been working with me for years and knows my likes and dislikes - and will put the work in as they know I am a regular customer, with a decent spend.

I think this says it all.

I have been doing a DONEx yearly for the last 13 years. I'm a leisure traveller only and that is about my only paid-for travel. Almost all the rest is FF redemptions or simple point-to-point trips.

On this amount of paid travel, I would not be able to establish the sort of ongoing deep relationship that RF, as a mega business+leisure traveller, has with his TA.

I always max out my DONEx as much as possible - I certainly use all 16 sectors (and the 20 back in the day), extend it widely across the globe, fly the longest possible sectors (eg. I never fly something like LHR-E coast LOTFAP ports - always to the W coast or vice-versa) and buy separate whY for short return flights out and back to DONEx ports if I want to do a little more shorter-hop exploring or where they offer no J within a region.

I usually glean around 1600+ SCs from a DONEx, so it keeps me in the WP manner that I have become accustomed to.

So, even though I pay full tote, it satisfies my needs and I feel that I get the value out of it. If I want to get the cost down substantially I know that I have the option of booking a cheaper DONEx from some ports outside Australia but at the moment I'm prepared to pay for convenience.

Where I do save $$ on a 6-9 week DONEx is by mostly not staying at expensive hotels. Of course, as a solo traveller, that is more easily done than with a SWMBO in tow.

 

[Isochronous]

I gather the QR and AY RTW deals are not available online and one can only get them via TA?

 

[RooFlyer]

I gather the QR and AY RTW deals are not available online and one can only get them via TA?

Don't know about QR at all, but for AY, I don't think so ... I've never drilled down into the web site to check, but I don't think you can get the non AY sectors so readily on the web site and certainly not at the AY price. The RTW my TA has been looking at uses QF as feeder SYD-Asia, a long 'surface sector between MIA and SCL (which would be filled in by Y short hops), and then QF again between SCL and SYD. The pricing on these QF sectors is definitely below what QF would charge. The TA can also phone AY, or LH or whoever and ask for exceptions to certain rules, and if we ask far enough out, we often get them. For instance if I'm on a LH J RTW construction, and fly FRA-BOG, then do my short economy thing (non LH ticket) to get to LAX and then get UA LAX-MEL, LH won't allow a 'surface sector' between South and North America (to stop just the sort of thing I'm doing ). But ask, and ye shall receive, apparently.

I should say that the reason we've gone down the 'tailored' route in this case is that the trip is work on my own dime shock so efficiency and lowest price (but maintaining J long haul) were the keys. I priced it out on the OneWorld and also StarAlliance 'planner' tools and for what I was doing, it was just too expensive. The JohnM approach, where you aim to max out all the allowances within a fare band couldn't be applied here.

 

[Jacksond]

All very interesting. Not sure what DONEx means, though. I have access to a TA recommended by a friend who uses them a lot, so no problems there, My relatives in the US are moving targets (caravan to Florida in winter, back to Idaho or California, etc in summer.) so I won't be able to plan much for a few months yet.

 

[RooFlyer]

DONEx = code for a business class ('D'), ONE world explorer fare, with x = 3, 4 or 5 continents

 

[Jacksond]

DONEx = code for a business class ('D'), ONE world explorer fare, with x = 3, 4 or 5 continents

Thanks for the info.

 

[JohnM]

DONEx = code for a business class ('D'), ONE world explorer fare, with x = 3, 4 or 5 continents

And, just to complete the loop, LONEx is economy :shock:, while AONEx is first.

As RF as noted, x=3 is not possible from Australia. An XONEx from Australia is deemed to travel through the Asian Zone. I think it must be a hangover from the days when it was basically impossible to get in/out of Australia without calling into SIN, BKK etc.

Note the importance of the word 'Zone' - they are not just continents as your atlas would show them. Eg. Dubai, Morocco etc. are in the European Zone; the Caribbean and Central America are in the N America Zone. Understanding such things can be useful for getting the best out of an XONEx.

Also, just to quickly summarise key XONEx rules: the limit is 16 sectors, with no mileage limit, must go in the same direction between continental zones but can go in any direction within a zone (except only one full trans-con is allowed - eg. PER-SYD/BNE/MEL, LAX-JFK/MIA), limit is 4 sectors/zone except for the N American zone where it is 6.

Important to note that QF codeshares on EK metal are not eligible as XONEx sectors as EK is not a OW Alliance member.

All here: https://www.oneworld.com/flights/round-the-world-fares (there are links to this site on all OW Alliance web sites)

I find the online planning and booking tool very useful.

Note that a OneWorld Explorer is not to be confused with a Global Explorer.

 

[Jacksond]

Thanks for the further information. To my regret, I doubt that AONEx will be in my immediate future and LONEx would be too painful for anything but short flights at my age!