I’ve successfully booked a rtw trip and I’m looking at potential side trips without breaching the rtw rules. For example, could I do a flight from a stopover city to another city(with a Qantas one world airline), stay there for less than 24 hours, return to the stopover city and then fly out of that city within 24 hours to my next stopover without paying extra points? I’m just not sure if I can transit through the stopover city.
If you don’t mind sharing details of your itinerary, it would help us identify any possibilities. Info like dates and routes would be useful.
I’ll be arriving in Helsinki from 27 August and flying out at 1600 hours on 13 September and I was wondering if I could do a side trip using one world airlines that is less than 24 hours and gets me back into Helsinki prior to my flight out on the 13th September without breaking the rules.
For example Finnair 12th September Helsinki to Copenhagen departing at 8.45 and arriving there at 11.40, then return to Helsinki on Finnair on 13th September departing Copenhagen 8.45am and arriving Helsinki at 11.45 am.
So it’s less than 24 hours and it’s in a one world airline. My query is, can I then fly out of Helsinki that day on my my rtw ticket? I don’t know if I’m breaking the rtw rule about not going through the same airport twice.
The above is just an example to demonstrate my question and not necessarily a trip I would plan to do.
Thank you for your help.
By my understanding of the terms “stopover” and “transfer” and the rule “Maximum of 1 stopover (over 24 hours) and two transits (up to 24 hours) per city”, I suspect you will be still within the Qantas OneWorld RTW rules.
In the more practical side of things, you will need to weigh up whether the cost/risk/hassle of revising your RTW itinerary is worth the $ savings. It is approximately A$200 for an economy return flight. For a 1hr 40min flight and potentially a typical non-real J intra-EU flight, might not be worth the trouble to get on a business class flight.
I’m conscious of the horror stories in the past where itineraries become a problem when you start making changes and you get an incompetent agent to make the changes. Things might have improved since, I hope.
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Thank you for your response. I just used that trip as an example because it’s hard to explain clearly what my query is. I probably should have used a better example that represents good value. I would make sure that it was a one world alliance plane and also look at the cost. I just didn’t know if a side trip met the rtw rules and didn’t want to do a lot of work and then find that it wasn’t possible.
I’m not quite clear on what exactly you are proposing, so it depends on whether this is allowed.
Case 1: ALLOWED
You land in Helsinki on the 27th. Your next flight is from Helsinki to Copenhagen. Then from Copenhagen, you go to say, Japan via Helsinki. Then this is allowed, because you first arrive in Helsinki for a stopover, and then you go through Helsinki as a transit.
Note this means that Helsinki won’t appear as a destination twice in your booking (that’s essentially how you check if you’ve breached the stopover rule).
Case 2: Not allowed
You arrive in Helsinki. Then you fly to Copenhagen, have a grand time, and return to Helsinki. Then, Helsinki would appear as your destination twice in your RTW booking, which breaches the 1 stopover per city rule.
Hope this clarifies things.
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Thank you.
I land in Helsinki and on the day before I fly to my next destination, I make a side trip using a one world alliance flight to go to Copenhagen. I return to Helsinki less than 24 hours ( so I’ve “transited” through Copenhagen) later to fly out to my next stopover a few hours later. Would it look like I’m transiting through Helsinki to go to my next stopover? I feel like it would because I would only be there for a few hours after arriving the second time.
Yes, by definition. However, I wonder if you could get the Qantas agent to agree. When booking on the website, often times, even though it is on the same day, if I put the same city in the destination twice, it counts as two stopovers which breaks the rules.
Yes, it’s tricky but I think I’ll give it a go and see what happens. Thanks for your help.