There are various schools of thought regarding buying tickets for a multi-destination or around-the-world, trip. With a “round-the-world” or similar fare with one of the major airline alliances (Oneworld, Skyteam and Star are the big ones) there are quite a few restrictions. Usually mileage based (sometimes by # of continents visited), travel must be in one direction, with no backtracking. There do seem to be some reasonable fares out there, but we found this option to be too restrictive, and too complicated to figure out. If you have a firm route in mind and must-see stops, and if you’re much more organized than we are, this might be a good option. We intend to investigate this further for the next phase of our trip, since we’d like to use our air reward miles to pay for some flights. Oneworld Alliance, for example, will let you use miles for a multi-stop itinerary. They calculate the miles for you if you call in with your route.
Discount ticket brokers can put together a very flexible set of one-way tickets for a pretty reasonable price. Agencies that specialize in around-the-world tickets often work with a wide variety of international airlines that may be hard to book or deal with on your own, and some have the ability to get a better price by buying tickets in foreign currencies.
Some people choose to buy the first few tickets, then make up the rest as they go along. Although we loved the idea of how much flexibility this allows, we were a little put off by stories of being stuck somewhere with the only option being to buy a high-priced ticket and of spending too much time in a place looking for and booking future fares rather than enjoying the stop. Some countries’ entry requirements include showing an onward ticket as well.
Edward Hasbrouck’s book The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, has a great section on this topic, including a chart with all the advantages and disadvantages.
We chose a combination of options two and three. We purchased tickets through Airtreks as follows:
New York to Cape Town, South Africa (via London); Capetown to Johannesburg, South Africa; Johannesburg to Perth (via Dubai), Australia, Perth to Sydney, Sydney to Aukland, New Zealand; Aukland to Buenos Aires, Argentina; Buenos Aires to Santiago, Chile.
We kind of had our hearts set on including Easter Island on the way from New Zealand to South America, but they just couldn’t make it work and still stay in budget. The total for this itinerary came to about $5,000, and ticket dates can be changed for a small fee (based on the airline’s rules).
We will be spending from a month to 6 weeks or so in each place, which means we’ll be in South America in late November. Travel in South America is cheaper and often easier by land, so we plan to figure things out there. We are hoping to spend New Year’s with friends in Venezuela.
