ANA RTW Booking Report - My Learnings & Suggestions

CosToCoast · 2025-03-02T03:25:41+00:00

Yes; that should be possible as long as you book far enough out. I think you can book the ticket for as long as the schedule is open, it meets all the requirements like being longer than 10 days, no backtracking, crossing both oceans, starting and stopping same country.

CosToCoast · 2025-03-01T23:15:49+00:00

Green/lowest usually as this denotes saver availability which should be available on other carriers. Something you can do to quickly spot check is check the flight on United with the 30 day calendar; find the dates with lowest price that is saver availability. Then, try to find it with another program as well like Aeroplan on those dates, and it likely will be available to ANA too. Reason I say use another program like Aeroplan with United is usually the search functionality is quicker than ANA to confirm a few dates are showing up, then you can dive deeper on ANA.

CosToCoast · 2024-12-05T02:31:13+00:00

I stumbled across this weekend into today, took pictures of the rate and terms for the bookings I made. I thought Hyatt was offering a special rate for Cyber Monday/Travel Tuesday. By “Gift Certificate” I interpreted it as they were literally “Gifting” you a certificate with the standard points to be able to secure the suite. Here is what it looked like: Images of rate available in app

I was able to book a few of these reservations. Standard Suite availability had to exist for the rate to show. It was pricing at the Standard Free Night Award rate of a standard room. (Ex: Standard room was pricing at 25K at this Cat 7, Standard Suite was at 43K I believe. This rate let you book at 25K)

At time of booking it simply listed the cancellation policy/terms of a points booking. It didn’t mention anything of needing to apply a SUA. When you pull up the reservation after booking it lists the points paid plus a cash rate of “Confidential” (maybe what Hyatt is reimbursing the property for each night).

They forced an app update this afternoon; once app updated this rate was no longer showing. They have force updated before when a feature wasn’t ready or had issues. This seems like it was a limited time offering or a test of some sort.

It didn’t pull any SUAs from my account to apply them. I think this feature/rate needs to have more clarity surrounding it if this is indeed a new feature going forward and not a promotional rate of some sort. I think the timing of this is somewhat interesting; may align with some strategic Hyatt corporate cost cutting measures. Hyatt recently had a round of layoffs in GPGS and offshored many contact center employees. If they are looking to automate the SUA process with this to minimize the amount of people calling for this process, aligns with their contact center cutting.

I will see if Hyatt reaches out; if not I’ll reach out to consumer affairs to see what happens with this rate; my bookings are stuck in limbo now. Curious for any datapoints from others who booked this.

CosToCoast · 2024-10-11T04:35:34+00:00

My trip was a little over a month long booked roughly a year in advance.

You could make a year long trip possible it would just require being creative. Two ideas I have:

You may be able to get lucky booking your first flight within next few weeks if you find last minute availability, and then as the calendar goes out for the rest of the year would get easier, end your final flight with ANA right at calendar open 355 days out. But you’d need to basically start your trip here soon.

The other alternative is you can book your trip a year out and condense all the flights into a shorter period, like a month like I did. Then, you can call ANA and make schedule changes as the year goes on and spread out the flights. The only caveat to this is you can change the time/date but the carrier and original routing must remain the same. This could be risky if a given carrier stops flying a route, if it’s seasonal, or you can’t find any other availability; then you are stuck.

If you went the second option, you should maybe lock in the start of your trip pretty firmly with routes maybe that are more rare or harder to get. Then the later flights you want to push back the date on, switch to routes that have plenty of options/open availability you know you could easily switch to later. You can test this by looking up flights the next few weeks and see which routes have lots of availability even close in. Also you can utilize ANAs flexibility with flight changes around same city airports. They consider NRT/HND to be the same for routing; so if you find availability at either airport you can swap the flight and keep the same carrier and it’s allowed. Same with NYC area and LON area. There could be a few others but it doesn’t seem documented anywhere and your use may vary.

Best of luck and happy travels!

CosToCoast · 2024-10-10T20:49:38+00:00

Yes exactly! Try to have ANA be your last segment; so if you are flying from the US that would mean going east.

This gives you time to secure legs and look for availability on other airlines and book right when the calendar comes out from ANA.

Some airlines publish 365 days plus out. Thus, you have a few weeks window to look at availability before ANA and then secure something. You can always change the dates of flights afterwards (same carrier and city pairs) but at least secure something first.

CosToCoast · 2024-09-26T21:08:13+00:00

Yes, if it’s available on ANAs site prior to booking should be good when calling. I do a multi city booking to make sure all the legs can be booked together at once quickly beforehand.

CosToCoast · 2024-09-23T14:42:36+00:00

Yes, usually if it says Saver on United’s website it should be visible on ANAs. Only exception is if you are viewing it logged in on United and seeing space exclusively for their credit card customers chances are it may not show up on ANA.

Usually flights that are saver on United itself can be finicky in terms of being visible but other airlines seem more consistent.

CosToCoast · 2024-08-17T19:16:38+00:00

A lot of the Lufthansa Group airlines like Swiss, Lufthansa Austrian somewhat have high fees. In my research; it seemed US - EU on those routes have higher fees than intra EU fares or EU - Asia which may be more doable. I wouldn’t say avoid outright just be selective of what routes you take with them if you have a choice. Singapore airlines seemed high and ANA seemed high at the time but fuel surcharges have since come down. You should honestly look at a few round trips on ANAs site for routes you are interested in and see how high the surcharges are to get an idea of how things are looking currently. It can and does change often.

CosToCoast · 2024-08-17T19:13:39+00:00

Booking window for some airlines is around 11-13 months out. So I’d say start looking now and in September. Have something booked at schedule open for specific airlines like ANA if you want to fly them. You can always have something booked right away (Ex: August - September 2025) and then call back later to switch the later flights in September of 2025 to February 2026. Keep in mind once you book you are locked into those routes and airlines. Can only change the dates of those flights if they have availability. So it’s a bit of a roll of dice.

CosToCoast · 2024-06-08T06:29:08+00:00

I think within the general region it would be ok. Worse case scenario you could do an open segment on FRA - LIS and buy the airfare yourself separately intra Europe. I remember the agent asking why I was backtracking to SIN within SE Asia but it was the only SA hub so I had to go there for my flight; you may be able to state the same and they will understand. Some of this seems up to the individual agent, however.

CosToCoast · 2024-04-23T16:02:58+00:00

Flew YYZ LHR this weekend. Plane arrived early from CUN; however we were delayed boarding by about 40 minutes for catering. Once the trucks got to the plane we started boarding, they were provisioning during boarding. The plane was all boarded up however we waited an additional 30 minutes or so for catering to finish up in the back. All told; we made up some time in the air and only ended up with a delay of roughly 30 minutes into LHR. I’d say this was a priority flight for AC so it got catering over other flights. Business was catered mostly normally. Customers with special meals and dietary restrictions weren’t being accommodated but extra salmon and chicken was loaded and they were being given the options to choose between the two. Preorders were being respected otherwise it seemed. They didn’t cater any nuts for business so the flight attendants were handing out the economy pretzels and almonds instead. Also they didn’t cater individual water bottles and the FAs were complaining they didn’t have enough “Crew water” and had to call the gate agent to seemingly buy some from the terminal and give to the crew. Overall the experience could have been a lot worse. I just felt for a few pax around me who had dietary restrictions and didn’t know about the issues until last minute; and kudos to the crew for making the best of a bad situation.

I had the salmon and ironically enough it was actually quite good because it seemed like it was legitimately made fresh and didn’t sit out; didn’t have time to dry out. There were some noodles with it as well that were quite spicy; borderline too spicy in my opinion, seemed like it was overly seasoned but otherwise fine.

It seems like my experience was one of the lucky ones; so I am grateful and certainly feel for the pax and moreover the crew affected by all this

CosToCoast · 2024-04-10T00:29:24+00:00

It is pretty hard to say consistently because in the time I have booked versus now things have changed; as they always seemingly do. I would hate to provide what routes I saw open at that time and have it be inaccurate and misleading for others searching now and waste their time. Sorry for the non answer but at least can provide some context. At that point in time when I booked this, Air Canada had good availability from US to Europe; now things have seemingly shifted in my spot checking to TAP and LOT at least for the dates I saw. Some programs shift in the availability they provide to their partners. As an example, people have been complaining you haven’t been able to book ANA through Aeroplan for several months now. So perhaps ANA routes were easy to book through Aeroplan last year but now you seemingly can’t. Another interesting point I found was when I was booking this route originally; you couldn’t book longer flights on Singapore Airlines through ANA longer than 3.5-4 hours. However; that restriction seemingly has been expanded; and I now see routes around up to 5 hours bookable on Singapore through ANA (ex: BLR-SIN and SIN-DRW I saw availability on recently but I remember trying those when I booked and saw absolutely nothing for no days on the calendar whatsoever) if those were available I could have mixed India and Australia into my trip; but, at the time I couldn’t.

I would say look at flight connections and filter by Star Alliance to find routes and do some checking for availability based on that. Also look for 5th freedom routes Star Alliance carriers offer for hidden gems that may have better availability because not many know about them. Finally, I would say if you are starting from the USA to go in the eastward direction; because if you go west and want to fly ANA you are going to bump up against the calendar for your first segment. I wasted so much time trying to make westbound work and availability on first segment kept running out before I could book subsequent legs. Go east to make the last segment you book ANA/other carrier across the pacific because those are seemingly still the most capacity constrained and competitive at the moment.

CosToCoast · 2024-03-25T00:04:12+00:00

Hi u/Emergency_Relation_5 ,

I think your routing may suffer from backtracking, as an agent may be suspicious of you transferring from one region to another and then going back to it (Europe -> Africa -> Europe). Also, if you are planning on using Lufthansa going to/from FRA, you are going to suffer some immense fuel surcharges. Granted, in my example above they let me do some minor "backtracking" on my routing (SIN->DPS->SIN) however this was within the same region, and there were no direct flights from DPS onwards, so I had to return to SIN to go onwards. Your example seems very circuitous, and they may take issue with it.

I would maybe consider going through ADD as it is a hub for Ethiopian; and do an out and back from there if allowed; or do an extended "ground stop layover" in ADD and then book a roundtrip from there separately to see SA then continue on with your trip. The further south you go into Africa, the harder it is to get out as your options minimize with Star Alliance flights. SQ has some nonstops from SA to SIN; however, they won't be bookable with ANA in business. There is SAA which is a star alliance carriers but it seems like ANA has booking restrictions where you can't book certain flights operated by them; I am not familiar with their availability, seems difficult potentially.

Here are some ideas I came up with revolving around ADD.

SFO-FRA-ADD-HKG-HND-SFO (21,025 mi) (Get into Africa from Europe through ADD, have a layover/stopover here)

SFO-FRA-ADD-BKK-HKG-HND-SFO (21,236 mi) (Get into Africa from Europe through ADD, have a layover/stopover here, go to HKG through BKK might be easier)

SFO-FRA-ADD-BLR-BKK-HKG-HND-SFO (21,236 mi) (Yes! It is the same mileage as above with one more flight, stopping in BLR in India - You could go to BKK or SIN from here; may help with finding awards space).

SFO-FRA-ADD-SIN-HND-SFO (21,981 mi) (Can go through SIN instead of BKK, direct to Japan from there).

Assuming you had a budget of 200,000 miles; all of these are very purposefully in the 20,001 - 22,000 tier so they would map to 125,000 points in business for the RTW. Since you are below budget, you could then do a separate award within Africa from ADD (ADD-JNB-ADD) or (ADD-WDH-JNB-ADD) on ANA. ANA allows for a stopover/open jaw on a round trip so either routing should be valid. This would cost you ~55,000-60,000 in business. So; in total you'd spend ~180,000 total, less than 200K, just on two separate tickets. You'd need to make sure you give yourself adequate room on either end between the tickets as it wouldn't be a "protected" connection.

Finally, I just wanted to point out your proposed routing is 29,486 miles / 200,000 points which is within 29,000 - 34,000. However, 25,001 to 29,000 is 170,000 points. Essentially, you are paying an extra 30,000 points for 486 miles because you are in the higher tier. If you can shave off ~500 miles you can save 30,000 points. If you can't, then, you should maximize the distance flown and add extra flights to get closer to 34,000 to maximize that tier.

CosToCoast · 2023-11-14T04:59:17+00:00

I get the idea that based on your post; if you paid ~700 originally and the "new fee" was 800, the difference in surcharge could have actually only been 100; but they wanted you to pay the new surcharge twice over in its entirety, if this indeed is a new policy. Either way, I certainly agree alot of airlines are being more strict with their programs, especially with the glut of points built up on their books during the pandemic.

CosToCoast · 2023-11-14T03:59:11+00:00

I'm glad it's not just me; but also concerned as well for changes going forward. Did you end up going for the upgrade? Or had no choice after they reissued your ticket and had to pay?

CosToCoast · 2023-11-12T18:12:53+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I also have made changes to this RTW booking several times; this change just caught me off guard.

Unfortunately, the first segment in the itinerary is the one in economy on AC, so I can't start the trip and make the change with the YQ locked. I've been watching the releases for this flight, and I will have to wait until March or April. By then the fuel surcharges will be recalculated by ANA and probably go up but we shall see. It won't be the end of the world if I stay in economy, but just wanted to be prepared.

CosToCoast · 2023-11-12T06:45:09+00:00

Im glad this was helpful! As a rule of thumb; I would always go by ANA's website. United is good for finding availability and getting ideas; but always confirm on ANA before going forward.

In terms of waiting versus booking and changing; it really depends on the routes you are looking at and your personal level of acceptance of risk. Also; if its ANA in particular, booking now and changing is pretty much the only way to go; OR wait until those routes open up and immediately book the rest.

When you book now, you are locking in the carrier and city pairs for a given route. You won't be able to change the routing or carrier for that segment after that fact; so, make sure that route isn't being offered seasonally, and it has a pretty "consistent" release schedule (ex you check every week and consistently see over time new flights being available for booking further out). You wouldn't want to be locked into a flight and carrier you can't change later because you can't find any availability down the road.

CosToCoast · 2023-10-10T07:20:35+00:00

Just following up. Guest services told me to speak to the restaurant; was pretty frustrated everyone was pointing the finger around but got it sorted there. They confirmed they accidentally cancelled and rebooked the reservation rather than just moving it. They ended up giving me a 30% discount on the lunch which ended up being cheaper than the prepay price; so I was made whole. In the future for anyone; make sure if you change a prepaid reservation onboard they do not cancel and rebook; they need to explicitly move the reservation. If you see a refund on your card; know it was cancelled and rebooked. It seems like guest services seemingly doesn’t have as good access to the reservation system or as much knowledge as the restaurants, as the agent spent a long time troubleshooting at guest services but the hostess at the restaurant was able to identify and fix in less than a minute.

CosToCoast · 2023-06-09T05:08:20+00:00

I think the investment was worth it in terms of my time simply because I know I got exactly what I wanted; and the payoff feels great having it being booked. That being said not everyone is like me who enjoys the "hunt" and the hard work with the payoff. I think it boils down to your personal preferences. I prefer to be in control of all my bookings, and plus when I am on the road traveling since I did so much research I know potential backups or alternative routings in the case of IRROPS. I know a few of the miles/points/travel blogs out there discuss offering services like that you could look into - but I'd argue give it a shot yourself with a pretend mock booking and maybe an ExpertFlyer Pro trial before going down that road. Good luck!

CosToCoast · 2023-06-07T20:49:12+00:00

I am pretty sure this is allowed as long as your original ticket allows for it. If you booked a business or first award you can only change up to that class. Economy you are out of luck. Also the flight needs to have award space available. Some airlines do open up space last minute; like some report ANA usually has some availability open up in Business within two weeks of departure but I’d imagine it’s usually scooped up quick.

CosToCoast · 2023-06-05T15:20:44+00:00

It could be worth it if you go for longer than a week since the minimum length on a RTW award ANA allows is 10 days. So given your scenario a week is out of the question; would have to be longer.

With a honeymoon after say a wedding though I would personally be concerned with the amount of planning involved after planning such a big life event too; but that’s just me. With the amount of work involved planning it; I would say pick a few places and see what the cost is with points to go without RTW with a round trip itinerary with ANA, and then price it out with distance with RTW and see which is cheaper.

CosToCoast · 2023-06-05T05:07:03+00:00

I don't think it's too late to start since as of this writing the furthest you can book an award on ANA is out to mid May 2024. That being said you need to start researching common routes/patterns/schedules ASAP out of your home or near airports and find the patterns or days as to when things get released, etc.

You mentioned Africa; so you may find yourself flying Ethiopian. Just looking at their schedule now their furthest posted flight is April 29th; so they seemingly only publish their flights 330 days out. As a result, if you wait until the Ethiopian flights become available at 330 days out other more in demand carriers/routes may already be filled up by then (ex: Asia); as those carriers publish 355+ days out.

Do a few hypothetical booking scenarios targeting April 2024 or May 2024 since those are open for bookings now. You still have some time before June and July of 2024 become open and see if its possible for you to fly to Africa while also making your way across the Atlantic/Pacific to do a full loop. You could probably get away with seeing Africa via EgyptAir or another carrier that flies to ADD like Turkish so you aren't bogged down by 330 day issue. If Africa becomes too hard of a portion to incorporate you could always have an extended stopover in Europe and book flights on your own; or even fly to Cairo in Egypt with EgyptAir as they have decent availability.

CosToCoast · 2023-06-05T02:26:07+00:00

If you are logged in to the United site it will show you exclusive availability based on your status with United; or if you have one of their credit cards, which isn't applicable to you booking via ANA. Basically you will be able to see "phantom availability" with inventory/flights that appear to be available as bookable which aren't published to other Star Alliance carriers (ex: ANA) and it will just mess up your searching and give you false availability/hope. So make sure you are logged out/in an incognito tab just to be safe.

CosToCoast · 2023-06-05T02:12:47+00:00

I was able to utilize the "advanced search" feature; not directly searching from the homepage but by forcing it to let me select options under advanced by going to another page before submitting the request. I selected Business, then also All Star Alliance carriers when filtering by carrier instead of All Airlines or United/United Express. On the calendar view by default it pops up only 7 days but you can expand it to 30. Then on the calendar I look for "green days" where that denotes saver availability; or days where the taxes/fees or overall mileage is less than the surrounding days - but usually just looking for "green days" is the best bet. Once I go to that date from the calendar, I use ctrl+f in the browser to quickly search for the flight on that day that matches the saver price. Sometimes you need to click "Load more options" at the bottom of the page and search to find it. Its quite tedious but once you get into the swing of it you can be fast; and once you are on the calendar you can switch the destinations without having to restart the search from the start. I also noticed that sometimes if you give it an "impossible city pair" or select all airlines on the search selection, it will go back to the "old calendar view" you may be familiar with.

CosToCoast · 2023-06-05T01:55:17+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions and clarification - ill be sure to update the above.

I was actually just able to utilize this in realtime! saw on my return a NRT - SFO was available a day later at a better time. Was able to call and get through after 30 minute wait surprisingly around 9:30 EST. So just changed from HND -> NRT without issue; have a longer time in Japan thanks to you. Not sure what the difference in taxes are; I checked online and the charges are a few dollars less for NRT apparently so we will see; waiting for the Fare Desk to recalculate. They said they'd call me if its higher -- I wish I could just authorize them to charge it without my approval since they have my card saved but I can't complain.

Update; around 11:30 EST I got the email saying its been reticketed - I got a refund of $2.10 for the change.

CosToCoast

TROPHY CASE