Interesting article, tho some of the Star Alliance stuff might be a bit theoretical ?
We hold an SQ booking in F for Sep/Oct (well, its seats only as T/A says we hv until early May to pay..) from MEL via TKO to LAX, and then from NY thru FRA and SIN back home. All 777 apart from a bit of 380.
One of the options we did look at, as part of this SQ fare, was taking ANA from TKO right across to NY, but neither the TA, or us directly, could find ANY fare that includes ANA in F for that leg to NY. The Star Alliance RTW tool defaults to economy for many legs and wont show F. I can see SQ codeshares TKO/NY on ANA metal, but a phone call to SQ says they only do codeshares in J. Looking at ANA website they have good fares in J from Aust direct to Jpn then NY, they have extortionate one way F fares Tko/NY, you cannot get the website to show a mixed-class fare (J from Aust, then F from Tko), their phone enquiry line never answers, the online chatbot thingy says it cant help on the mixed-class question, and an email enquiry to ANA gets an auto-response and nothing more.. So we'll stay with what we know, even tho we'd actually like to try ANA up the pointy end.