• Needless to say, the more stops you make, the higher the price of your round-the-world ticket. A rock-bottom price might run around $1,500 for a bare bones trip with 4 or 5 stops. This is a rough estimate, but to visit four continents and make 10-15 stops, count on spending $3,500-$4,000.
• RTW tickets are generally offered by airline alliances. These feature websites where you plug in your 'wish list' of destinations. A flight plan is devised among the participating airlines, along with a computation of what your trip will cost.
Competing alliances feature different airlines, so it pays to shop around. Some, for instance, may be ideal for visiting Australia and India, but have few flights to Brazil or New Zealand.
• You pay less if you follow the well-beaten path to destinations such as London, New York, Delhi and Bangkok, etc. at the expense of hard-to-reach places such as Crete or Ethiopia. Thus, you may travel "around the world," but only experience its "greatest hits."
Have you really been to England, for instance, if you see only London and miss out on Bath, Stonehenge and the Lake District? Have you experienced India if your stop includes nothing more than Delhi and the Taj Mahal?
• Some travel writers claim that RTW tickets are more expensive if you depart from the United States as opposed to other countries, such as Britain, Canada or Thailand. It may seem absurd to fly overseas and back to begin your round-the-world trip, but if the numbers crunch in that direction, it's worth investigating.
• Travel specialists -- or consolidators -- in major destination cities such as London, New York and Bangkok are renowned for putting together round-the-world flights along with budget packages to costly destinations such as Africa or India. These 'bucket shops' cobble together a string of less-expensive one-way tickets.
WINGING IT ON YOUR OWN
There's something to be said, however, for devising your own itinerary and purchasing your own one-way tickets from one destination to the next.
This is the approach I took traveling around the world in 2007, which was the basis of my book, Planet Backpacker.
Why? Because, for starters, I rode a mountain bike across Europe to begin the trip and no flight was necessary on the route between Dublin, Ireland and Budapest in Hungary. By cycling this route and filling in the gaps with trains, I was able to experience a great deal more of Europe than would have been possible by simply flying from London to Paris, Rome and Athens, or whatever.
My trip around the world was dictated by the things I'd always dreamed of seeing, rather than the cost of an airline ticket.
That meant visiting the land of my Irish ancestors and pedaling from sea-to-sea across England and down the Danube -- routes which struck my fancy. My interest in British seafaring led me to Portsmouth to see Admiral Nelson’s ship. I went to Budapest because back in junior high school, I’d read James Michener’s book, "The Bridge at Andau," about the Hungarian revolt against the Soviets and the “Butcher of Budapest.” I went to India to fulfill a youthful backpacker’s dream, and to Vietnam because of the impact that country had on my generation. Silly reasons, but they meant a lot to me.
Here's the breakdown on what I spent on flights around the world:
Flights:
Flight: Chicago to Dublin - $390
Flight: Budapest to Cairo: $515
Flight: Cairo to Mumbai $345
Flight: Mumbai to Kochi: $284
Flight: Kochi to Goa & Mumbai: $230
Flight: Mumbai to Bangkok: $290
Flight: Chang Mai to Phuket: $187
Flight: Krabi to Bangkok: $73
Flight: Bangkok to Hanoi: $231
Flight: Ho Chi Minh - Penang: $403
Flight: Singapore: - $65
Flight: Singapore-home/USA: Free (frequent flyer miles)
Total: $3,013
As you can see, by 'winging it' and devising my own trip piecemeal, I was able to visit a number of more obscure places at about the same rate that a standard RTW ticket would have cost, filling in with trains, ferries and bicycle in between.
There's also something to be said for traveling without an itinerary so you can travel more freely without being a slave to a flight schedule. And it may be cheaper to buy one-way airline tickets from countries along the way (such as Malaysia), rather than buying them ahead of time in the U.S. or Europe.
The disadvantage with this approach is that in the post-9/11 world many countries require that you have an outbound ticket to prove you're not a terrorist who's just stopping in to bomb a subway station. You can't even get in to India, for instance, unless you can prove that you've got a way out.
Even the European Union can be a problem. An Australian friend was almost denied entrance to Great Britain because he didn’t have an outbound ticket. He protested that he was planning to catch the ferry to France, but it was a close call. No worries if you’ve got a Eurail pass, of course.
LESSON LEARNED:
There's no "right" way to travel around the world. One strategy is to purchase a 'skeleton' RTW ticket to a few top destinations (ie. London, New York, Athens, Bangkok) and use them as hubs to explore Europe, Asia or the States by train or bus before continuing on.
For additional reading on RTW tickets, check out Wikipedia's entry on Round the world flights: http://wikitravel.org/en/Round_the_world_flights
Also, visit the following airline alliance sites to contrast and compare rates: Bon voyage!
One World Alliance: www.oneworld.com
Star Alliance: www.StarAlliance.com
Circle the Planet: www.circletheplanet.com
Airtreks: www.airtreks.com
Around the World Tickets: www.aroundtheworldtickets.com
Air Brokers International: www.airbrokers.com
STA Travel: www.statravel.com
Order Planet Backpacker on this website for more travel tales & tips from Robert Downes
