BootsnAll Travel Community

My boyfriend and I are planning a RTW trip and have been running into a lot of problems with booking the RTW tickets.

Were being told that we can't "backtrack", that we must pre-determine all of our departure dates and then we're also hearing that we don't need to pre-plan the departure dates by others.

Does anyone have the low down on this. We've already looked at airbrokers, travellers point, bootsnall and airtreks.com, all to no avail.

Can anyone just break it down for us, where you went, how much it cost, how did the travel dates work and how you avoided "backtracking", etc.

We're planning on going to all these places:
Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Peru, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janiero, Egypt, Bombay, Thailand, Japan, and most importantly we want to end in Europe. to live happily ever after.

Thanks much in advance!

Your more standard and cheaper RTW tickets are based usually in going in one direction with say up to six stops, tho from Oz. I do know of having seen some that do allow on a RTW from here to Europe and back, to go via America and also come back that way as well, if leaving from particular locations, but that is not applicable to your intentions with quite a bit N-S travel involved as well as going E-W.

What it seems may suit you best is to look at getting a package of flights and not necessarily a RTW if in fact you are going to finish in Europe if you have developed the requirements for residency.
I would have thought you could do that with air-treks so as then you could have a benchmark on which to compare what is offered by the likes of flightcentre and STA if you have those mobs in USA.
Before you even get that far,get your destinations in what ought to be the right order, ie SA,Fiji,NZ,Oz,Thailand, Japan,Bombay,Egypt,Europe and then have a look at developing a package for your main leg flights to SA, across the pacific,to Asia and couple a package with making use of the hundreds of budget airlines about these days, www.attitudetravel.com has a listing and as an example, you can do Singapore to Kolkata for S$66 with www.jetstarasia.com

I had the same problem from Cali and ended up going with airtreks.com and booking a sort of package deal through them. It was individual tickets but they did it all for me. I just bought all my big flights..from continent to continent. If you have intercontinent itinerary I think it may be cheaper to buy as you go, either overland or by local flight service.

I think there are very distinct differences between mostly travelling E-W and travelling N-S-E-W. The RTW packages like One World and Star Alliance seem better suited for E-W travel. Airtreks does a great job, but in the end seemed too expensive compared to fares I have found myself doing comparison shopping. I'm doing a RTW in a few months and have decided to budget shop much as gonorth suggests, and am saving myself at this point about 33% off the lowest quoted fares from airtreks. Furthermore, I don't need to book them all up front and worry about making certain dates and change fees.

First off, as gonorth says, organize where you want to go. As a sample part of my itinerary, it goes Anchorage->Auckland->Melbourne->Delhi->Bangkok->westwardbound. I'm backtracking due to some timing issues, but anyhow that's what I started with. If you try and book that in order it comes out pretty expensive.

I took that sample itinerary and began digging on www.sidestep.com and www.mobissimo.com, looking at flights along the way. I also take the cheapest results from those and look at the airlines website, and usually find a price about $20-30 cheaper than what's listed booking directly through them.

Anyhow, to give you an idea of some of the massaging I did...My initial flight goes from Anchorage to Bangkok, for about $600 (which is a great rate, btw). From there I looked into british airways for a multi-city trip from BKK->Auckland->Melbourne->BKK. Next is a round-trip from BKK->DEL->BKK. The end result is about $2k, which is $300 cheaper than the lowest quoted airtreks price for Anchorage->Auckland->Melbourne->Delhi->Bangkok. For the convenience I probably wouldn't care that much, but for my dates airtreks actually comes in at closer to $3k, so I'm saving $1k. Yes, I have to hassle with the extra stops in Bangkok, but there are a lot of extra stops in the airtreks version as well. I could also route through Singapore instead if I wanted a little change, and it is virtually the same price.

Find common routes and if you are backtracking, try to find round trips. If you are doing a loop at all, look into multi-city trips.