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Modifying Your Travel Itinerary While en route, you may wish to modify your travel itinerary. You may also have to modify it if your RTW travel plans extend more than 330 days beyond the date your RTW ticket was issued, which would have forced you to book “placeholder” arrival and departure dates for one or more of your RTW ticket destinations (for more information on that, see the GoRoundTheWorld.com RTW Ticket Primer by clicking HERE).
Modifying Local Travel Plans To modify local travel plans, that is, those for which you have booked internal flights, trains, buses, and the like, go directly to an office of the transport operator concerned. Particularly if you are in a location which does not speak the same native language as you, I would advise against making any modifications by phone because there is simply too much chance for error. By going directly to the transport operator, you will be issued new tickets or a refund on the spot, and you will be able to confirm everything with certainty.
Modifying RTW Ticket Reservations To modify RTW travel plans, you can usually make a change in the reservation for your itinerary with any member of the airline alliance you have chosen. To actually ticket the change, however, you are usually required to go to a ticket office or airport service desk for the member airline which originally issued your ticket. So, for example, if you booked a oneworld Explorer ticket using British Airways, you may be able to change your reservation by calling or stopping by any Cathay Pacific office; however, to actually ticket the change, you will eventually need to stop by a British Airways office or stop by a British Airways counter at an airport. The good news is that in many far-flung places, the individual members of a given airline alliance often combine their local branch offices under one roof. But that is not always the case.
Another glitch in changing RTW reservations issued by one of the airline alliances is that if you are about to take a flight on a member airline other than the one which issued your ticket, and you are at the airport counter for that other member airline, they will likely not be able to change your flight, even to catch the next earlier or next later flight, without the actual ticketing airline reissuing the ticket. This can be a real pain, because it may be impossible to find a local branch of the issuing airline at many locations. Relax, because there is really nothing you can do about it. If you happen to miss a flight, any member of the airline alliance should be able to rebook your reservation, but it will be up to you to find a branch office of the original, issuing airline to have it reticketed. That said, as one eventually learns, all things are possible with the airlines. So if you find yourself in circumstances such as these, then smile, be polite, and hope for the best. Perhaps a friendly airline employee will be able to do something for you “off the record.”
Dealing with Changes Outside the RTW Ticket Desk Hours of Operation If you wish to make a change to your RTW reservation at an odd hour, or if there is no local office for the airline alliance concerned, remember that you can often submit a change request via email, or you can call any of the particular airline’s offices in the world. My RTW ticket was on oneworld Alliance ticketed by American Airlines. Once when I was in Africa, in a country with no American Airlines or other oneworld Alliance office, I tried calling the American Airlines RTW ticket desk in the United States. They were closed, so I called their Shanghai office to make changes to my reservation. I had used the Shanghai office when I was in China and found them to be particularly helpful, so I kept their phone number handy the rest of my trip. If you happen upon a particularly “helpful” branch office for your ticketing airline, by all means do the same and call that office whenever you need to make a change. |
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New York City Sunrise
© Stephen Braun |
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