Great success - eventually.
So after waiting for the time to be right to book my first 280K Oneworld Award I was thrilled when after spending the best part of day on the British Airways site that everything I wanted (well mostly) was lining up so I keenly got on the phone to Qantas to book flights for Mrs IronBird and myself. I thought I'd share some insights into what went well and what took three phone calls to sort out.
My itinerary was complicated but I was certain that it complied with all the rules - PER - ADL (T) - SYD (S) - CNS (open jaw) - SIN - NRT (open jaw) - KIX - CGK (S) - HKG (T) - NRT (T) - YVR (open jaw) - LAX - HKG (T) - KUL (T) - SIN (final destination). Counting each of the open jaws as a stop plus the actual stops this was (I thought and eventually Qantas agreed was 5 stops. You'll notice that my origin (PER) and final destination (SIN) are different so as per the rules I counted the distance between these and also the distance of the open jaws and had a good few hundred miles to spare but was under 35,000 miles (well so I thought - but Qantas count differently to me).
Mrs IronBird is a bit simplier (PER - SYD - MEL - NRT - KIX - CGK - NRT - YVR - LAX - HKG - KUL - PER).
Some of these sectors will be with my wife (booked on a separate RTW ticket) and my children (booked with Aadvantage points).
So what worked well. Finding good availability (four J award seats) on many JL and CX flights within Asia. This was handy for me as I work in SEA and really important when trying to get everyone to skiing trip in Japan.
The other thing that was needed to get the trip sorted was some flexibility about where we'd fly to and being willing to book a couple of positioning flights. After all I am getting basically three holidays with one 280K booking so I didn't want to ruin my chances by steadfastly sticking to a particular itinerary. For instance I was hoping to travel from TYO or KIX to DPS but there absolutely no availability for this but I could find some to CGK and I'll just have to get a cheap ticket from there to Bali. Similarly while there was good availability getting to YVR there wasn't anything return (a quirk of the game we play I suppose). So I just kept looking (SFO, LAX etc) and found something out of LAX for both of us.
I'll also give credit to the phone operators at Qantas for while they didn't always get the rules right they were friendly and easy to talk to and tried hard to help make this work.
What didn't go so well and needed a two follow calls to sort out was both the mileage and pricing of the ticket. I had 578K points so enough for the two 280K fares and the 5K booking fee each. The first agent booked this as a one-way itinerary for 450K points (without telling me that he was deducting 450K points from my account). At the start of the phone call I'd said that I was calling to book two 280K OneWorld J RTW itineraries but when the computer put these as one-way fares he neglected to mention it.
I actually didn't realise this until I called back the next morning. The reason for the call back was that he'd mixed up the CGK - NRT - YVR sectors and had us flying from NRT to YVR on 13 July when we didn't arrive in NRT from CGK until 14 July. The lady on call two was surprised that it had gone through like that. Anyway she then informed that I'd been charged the 450K points and wondered why I didn't try to do it as a 280K booking - well I thought it had.
The reason she thought it was going through as a one way was that the open jaws (Qantas has a special name that I forget) were being counted as two stops (I didn't know why this would be the case). She was very supportive about trying to get the booking and fixed up the back to front CGK - NRT - YVR sectors (but had trouble seeing the JL availability I could see on British Airways - in fact all the operators had this trouble). She also suggested that I drop the domestic sectors to reduce the numbers of stops and we eventually booked that.
Nonetheless her reason that the open jaws were being counted as two stops didn't seem right. I knew that the distance needed to be counted but couldn't see anything in the rules that it counted as an extra stop so I called back for a third time.
After a while on hold while he checked out why it wasn't working he eventually found out that it wasn't the number of stops that was the issue but the distance going over 35,000 miles and therefore had be booked as a one way fare. Now despite being told that the computer is never wrong, I'd very carefully calculated the distances and knew that it was under 35,000 miles. But what the Qantas computer was doing was saying that I'd flown 26,000 miles to get from PER to SIN (via all my actual destinations) and therefore I had to fly 26,000 miles to return (instead of the actual 2,400 miles between Perth and Singapore). Apparently there is know way to manually tell the computer where SIN and PER actually are and this was going to be a deal breaker. We eventually got around this by changing the KUL - SIN sector to KUL - PER (in Y - I'd already booked the one J award seat for my wife). This now had me returning to my departure point and priced as being less than 35,000 miles. As I'll be returning to work in Indonesia after this trip I'll just miss this sector. Similar to JL availability the guy had trouble finding MH availability (until I mentioned that it might be hiding in another part of his system).
So we got there eventually and I'm really looking forward to every part of this trip (Christmas in Mission Beach, skiing in Japan with a defrost in Java or Bali and a July holiday to Canada) but I just wanted to share some of the learnings from the booking process. Keep some flexibility in destinations and in particular that despite being told that the 'computer is never wrong' sometimes it definitely doesn't make sense and to persevere until you get something workable.
But above all enjoy the actual destinations when you get there - that's what this is all about and I certainly looking forward to it all.
