re: "oneworld" award (140K/280K/420K) Planning - The Definitive Thread
As Agent 86 would say: "Missed it by that much...."
I have been putting together a 280K J Itinerary over about 6 months, using the "start & finish in Asia" technique to squeeze in 2 return trips to Europe on the one itinerary.
I was feeling pretty proud with myself that the itinerary calculated out to 34,984 miles in Great Circle Mapper (including the 1 surface sector).
But then the tears...
While I was getting my last 2 sectors booked through QFF, it turned out that the mile calculation method that they use measured the distance as 35,080 miles. A difference of 96 miles, or less than 0.3%. No amount of begging, pleading, whimpering, sobbing would make any difference. Computer said No!
So, as a result of the breach of the distance rule, the itinerary priced out a points difference of about an extra 500,000 points :shock:.
Fortunately I was able to salvage the situation by omitting one short domestic sector (and it's associated surface sector), which brought the miles total down by about 400. So then the itinerary was legal again, and my pulse rate & blood pressure were able to slowly return to normal after a little time and a lot of scotch.
So...Does anyone know of a better tool to use than GCM? i.e. one that exactly matches the Qantas/OneWorld tool?
TOOJ, you could try travelmath.com
You'd probably need to put in your itinerary to try it and compare the numbers it spits out to what QF came up with because I don't know if it's more accurate than GCM or not.
Thanks for the suggestion vetrade, but TravelMath gives an almost identical answer on my itinerary as GCM. Most legs were the same, a couple of legs were +/- 1 mile, and the biggest difference was 3 miles. All up, over my whole itinerary TravelMath gave an answer 2 miles more than GCM.
As another data point on the same issue...
I've been using the OneWorld FlightMap app today, idly pondering where our next OWCA adventure might take us, and I noticed that it also shows the point to point distances for each sector.
So I thought to myself: "This is the official OneWorld FlightMap, so no doubt it will show the 'correct' distances. And, even if its wrong, it should still be the official distance for OneWorld Award ticket milage calculations."
Wrong again...
When I added up all the sectors it showed a distance of only 24 miles more than GCM, and so still 72 miles less than the QFF booking system.
So, for my itinerary, I now have the following total milage calculations:
Great Circle Mapper:.........34,984
TravelMath:......................34,986
OneWorld FlightMap:.........35,008 (yes, I know that if I'd used this method in the first place I could have saved myself untold amounts of grief & (additional) grey hairs...)
QFF Booking System:........35,080
Incidentally, when I was doing the OneWorld FlightMap calculations, the single biggest individual sector difference was MEL-HKG. Great Circle Mapper shows it as 4,590 miles, and OneWorld FlightMap shows it as 4,611, a difference of 21 miles. While that's only 0.45% difference, if you're cutting it fine to squeeze into the 35,000 mile cap, it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back...
So the moral of the story is: As much as we'd like to think that distances between airports are well established, there still seems to be a small margin of fuzziness at the edges. So if you're in danger of hitting the 35,000 mile mark, I can only suggest that you leave at least 100 miles spare to allow for the variations.
Happy planning & flying
J