Trouble booking Star Alliance partner flights
 

We are in Canada. We need to be in France for a conference the end of June and then Australia for a conference in early July. It looks more convenient to fly from Paris to Sydney making this an around the world flight path than to fly back home via Canada to get to Australia.

But, the round the world tickets seem expensive for what we are doing and we really don't want more than 2 stopovers and it requires 3 as far as I can tell. Booking one-way tickets from Canada to Europe seems to require a higher fare class than we want (Latitude). The most cost effective routing we can find is coming back via Canada to Australia (around 3700 CAD, but all in Tango).

If I call Air Canada will they be able to link my two one way AC tickets with a partner airline in the middle? Or is there some online tool I am not aware of? An expedia search gave a high price.

Thanks for any insight.

I cannot answer your specific question but if you're willing to forego miles for a cheaper fare I suggest you try a RTW consolidator, like Airtreks who I've used and have always been happy with the fares they've provided. Last time I used them they also provided basic flight insurance at no additional cost.

Call Air Canada - yea, it will cost you $25 but an expert can find you the best routing. Air Canada can ticket you for partner airlines as well. I'd never book on expedia.

If you want to try an RTW arrangement, read the (very long) post here on such flights. To get a reasonable price, you need to buy in Japan, Cairo or South Africa.

<i>We are in Canada.</i>

Halifax? Yellowknife? Prince Rupert?

Using Toronto in the absence of knowing, I just looked on ITA and if you want to stay with Star Alliance it appears your cheapest options will be two separate return trips, Toronto - Paris - Toronto, nested around Paris - Sydney - Paris, the total for which comes in around CA$2800. I can't find any RTW products that will be able to match that price. Using non-Star Alliance members might reduce the price a little, e.g. American Airlines out of Toronto to Paris (via JFK or Philly) is around CA$200 cheaper than AC.

This is likely to be different, even dramatically so, if you're starting from somewhere in Canada with less coverage from your local airport(s.)

Yes, gardyloo, we are near Toronto. I never thought about doing it that way. I will look into that and also maybe call. I just hate dealing with those kinds of phone calls. Thanks for the help!

Calling AC did not help. Somehow the rate they quoted me included several legs of business class, which would be lovely, but not in the budget. Somehow the guy couldn't get us economy class.

Here is what I have done. For the flights from Canada to Europe I bought a AC Europe flight pass - 8 legs for 2 people. I am using two of them for DD and me to get to Europe. I am using 2 on another work trip and then the 4 left over we will both use to go to Italy at the end of summer.

We got one-way tickets from Paris to Sydney on Singapore airlines. This was reasonably priced for one-way.

We used miles to fly the leg from Sydney back to Toronto. Interestingly, we got some sort of a deal and for 60k miles each we get to fly premium economy.

The only negative is that with the flight pass we have to fly AC routes. This means to get to Spain, which is where we are headed we have to fly Rouge. I have heard nothing but bad things about Rouge and would have preferred a non-direct flight to avoid it.