HI.,
I am planning a trip around the world,.,for around 4 months,.,.starting in San Francisco on Nov.2nd, 2009,.,.costa rica, peru,new zealand,australia,bali,thailand, vietnam,,.,.etc.,,.,nepal,egypt,athens,greece,NY, drive down the east coast somehow, then fly or drive home. I have been checking out airtreks,.,.I love to be spontaneous,.,.,.I do not know whether to buy a rtw ticket or purchase them as I go. I understand about the visas, and how they want you to have a destination ticket when you arrive in each country. Can someone give me some advice,.,.
steve hart surfinghart@hotmail com I am sooooooo excited!!!!!

Airtreks are good - I've used them before and was very satisfied - but you're passing through Bangkok and Athens, which are both prime locations for finding cheap plane tickets.

That said, I'll make the obligatory comment on your itinerary: that's a LOT of places to try cram into four months. Twelve countries in sixteen weeks means you're going to be moving on every ten days or so. I know it's really tempting to try to cram as much as possible into the time you've got, but you might want to reconsider. I'm sure others here will back me up when I say you'll almost certainly have a much more rewarding trip if you pick, say, two to four countries and allow yourself time to really explore them.

If you do decide to stick with that itinerary though, you may be best off just buying your tickets in advance. Otherwise, you're going to be spending a lot of the limited time you have in each destination sitting inside travel agencies...

Hey there...

I'm actually going through the same situation. We will be traveling for a year, but the whole concept buying a RTW ticket or not seems like a difficult decision. My husband and I used Airtreks before, and they really were great. We never had any visa issues, etc. It was kind of fun to see what kind of airline you'd get put on as well. We flew the crappy US airline carriers as well as Emirates which was the best airline I think I've ever flown. (Not that the flights were the highlight or anything.)

Now that we're going on another RTW trip...but for longer, I'm confronted with the same pesky decision. Most of the people we ran into on our last trip were buying their tickets as they went. Some even had open-ended tickets! This surely would be the way to go, but I hear they are quite a bit more expensive.

I wonder if it might be best to book the overseas flights through Airtreks and the smaller flights (over land) through budget carriers in the country you are visiting.

If anyone else out there is reading this, I'd be interested to see if RTW tickets get any cheaper depending on the direction you go. Or if there is any way to find out which cities have mega cheap routes. For example, I know that I will be in Spain. After Spain, I'd like to go to Tanzania/Kenya, but I was trying to find the cheapest possible one-way ticket to Tanzania/Kenya from anywhere in Europe. Ryan Air has really cheap flights all over Europe, so I thought I might just use them to fly to the airport in which I'll leave to go Africa.

On a different note, it has been mentioned that you might be trying to cram too many destination into a 4 month window. I completely agree with this unless you just want to see the cities that you'll be flying in and out of...but, who wants to do that?!

If you're flying to Bangkok, you need to spend some time at the beaches! (It's easy to spend a month just in Thailand!)

During my last RTW trip we did a 5 1/2 month trip. This was the breakdown:

Madrid (2 months - teaching English)
Italy (1 month) <-- Way too much time for the budget that we were on
India (3 weeks) <-- Just enough time because I got sick at the end of the trip
Thailand (1 1/2 months) <-- NOT ENOUGH time
Singapore (2 days) <-- Too much time (I didn't really like it.)

All in all, I really feel like we saturated the parts of the world that we did see. By the way...we only did Rajasthan in India.

IRC I did out the numbers and the only time it really makes sense to get a rtw ticket is if you're flying South America- NZ, especially if you're under 26 and can get youth discounts. The reason for this is that flight route is just so expensive, otherwise the flexibility really makes up for any minute price differences you have.

Hello,

We will be leaving on our RTW mid-2010 and have pretty much decided on using Airtreks for our "major" flights. We received a decent quote from them and will book with them early next year.

I like the idea of having most of our flights paid for before leaving for the trip, especially since this is the single, largest item in our budget. Paying for most flights ahead of time is also a nice hedge against inflation (e.g. higher gas prices).

We, however, are not planing on including our flights within SE Asia in our Airtreks purchase since budget airlines abound in that region.

I hope this helps and that you have an excellent trip (I also second others' concerns about your jam-packed itinerary).

Cheers,
Nick