sfo-> lon -> del -> sfo?

This year I seem to be making my trip as difficult as possible...

My girlfriend will be in the UK during Oct and I want to meet here for a week or so there before continuing on to India. I plan on staying in India for about 3 weeks.

So my trip looks something like

Oct 24th fly from San Francisco/Oakland to London.
Oct 30th fly from London to Delhi/Jaipur
Nov 21st fly from Delhi/Jaipur to San Francisco/Oakland

So basically I need a series of one way tickets. I have looked into 'round the world tickets but they do not seem cheap at all. The cheapest I could find was about $2000 and it didn't go where I needed it to.

Any advice?

Make them RT tickets. London-Delhi-London. SF-London-SF. And maybe have your GF meet you in Amsterdam or wherever is cheapest to fly to India RT from.

you DON'T need one way tickets and you DONT'T need round trip tickets for every segment of your journey. Just go to a travel agent's and he can give you those three flights for the rate of normal return flights.
The airlines don't care if your return flight takes a different route, or if you have two stops in between, they just want to be sure that you take all flights with them and don't go with a competitor for your return flight.
The online forms for searching flights are not that sophisticated, you have to visit a travel agent's for such a 'custom roundtrip ticket'

Excellent ideas. That makes a lot of sense.

I didn't want to return to the UK but if it will save enough money that I wont mind it.

Thanks

Interesting to know. I generally try to arrange everything myself but in this case I am willing to give it a try.

Thanks for the advice.

I just found out by chance that with the amex flight form you can choose "multiple destinations":
http://go.americanexpress-travel.com...Type=multicity

I guess you need an amex card if you want to book there, but I think if amex has that multiple destinations option, so will others...

well, google knows everything as always, just google for "multi-destination":
http://www.google.com/search?q=Multi...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Thanks again for the info. I tried a few of these results and can't seem to get a decent price if it gives any results at all.

I did a little research into 2 round trip (RT sfo-lon and RT lon-del) tickets and found some reasonable prices, but I really need to go and talk to a travel agent to see what other options they may have.

Why don't you check on buying a ticket SFO-DEL-SFO via London and request a stopover in London on the way. This should be possible on British Airlines (which flies this route) and there may be other airlines flying this way as well. There may be a small additional fee for a stopover, but I would expect the ticket price would be less than $1500. You might be best off checking with a travel agent on this as websites generally work best with a very straightforward transaction.

You can deal with the Delhi-Jaipur-Delhi part separately and travel by rail or domestic carrier whichever works out best for you -- I don't know offhand which airlines fly this route but the web addresses are all listed in the sticky thread All about Domestic Flights which you can find here;

http://www.indiamike.com/india/showthread.php?t=12074

Like it's already been mentioned, a travel agent will be able to get the right prices for you. Online search engines typically aren't designed for that sort of journey.

I once did Portland > New Delhi > London (1 week layover) > Portland. Travel sites couldn't do it for less than a fortune but a travel agent made it happen with little fuss and at a price that wasn't much different than a standard single destination round trip ticket.

More good ideas, thanks

British Airways has a nice website. It looks like I can get a regular ticket through London for about $1400.

A travel agent is my next destination.

The travel sites all have multiple destinations (well the main ones).

Here in SF its not always such a great deal to go to travel agents anymore, you can usually do as well or better on line yourself -- everyone has the same resources now. You all probably know this.

But you will probably find that the RT are going to give you the best deal.

For instance, I just went to Expedia, chose random dates in September/October for your itinerary, flying on Friday 22nd SFO to London, Departing London Tues for Delhi, then flying Delhi to SFO Tues October 24th. You fly Delhi to LONDON, then LONDON to SFO. It's BA for $1500, which considering that I didn't choose the dates carefully, and its Expedia, and its BA, is a fine deal. I would give the URL but it will be expired by the time you get there.

But my point is for that particular itinerary, which I happen to know fairly well, two RT's will usually be how its done. Turns out if you do SFO-Europe-Delhi, it's just about the same time/price w/ small seasonal and time variations, as SFO Asia (BKK is my preferred)-Delhi. The second thing about doing a Europe or Asia layover is if you want you can break the trip up, again this is my preferred way of doing it b/c its such a long trip.

Have a great great time.