We initially planned on visiting Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. After looking around more, we decided to add Athens, Cairo, and Delhi to our list.
At first we thought buying a Round the World (RTW) ticket from on of the three main airline alliances would be the best way to get around the world. The prices seemed reasonable and it seemed it would be easier to add less accessible destinations (we thought about getting to Easter Island or Seychelles) for little overhead.
If you’re looking for a RTW ticket, you’ll typically start by browsing the main alliances: Star Alliance, One World, and Sky Team.
Early on, we really liked the fact that the One World Alliance offered the oneworld Itinerary planner, an advanced Flash site that lets you plan and book your trip. I hope this is where the others are headed.
We ended up calling Star Alliance because they have so many alliance members and seemed to offer good coverage for the areas we wanted to visit. After some waiting and call routing, we spoke with an agent at United. She told us the base price for the trip we wanted was $2,600. Michelle spent a lot of time dictating our itinerary and we were told someone at the rates desk would get back to us the following day with an adjusted price (ie, airport-specific taxes and fees for all of our destinations).
We didn’t receive a call the next day and so called that night after work. The agent said there was an error and sent it back to the rate desk. We received an itinerary by mail in the meantime, but quickly noticed that the agent entered one of the dates incorrectly. We called back to get that fixed and reached yet another agent. At this time we were told by another agent (there are no direct lines to anyone – I asked plainly -, so you’ll speak to a different person every time you call) that we didn’t qualify for the $2,600 base price. Rather, our trip would start at about $4,657 + taxes/fees.
Read the full summary of this RTW booking incident at my main site.
We were irate. Michelle bore most of it actually, as she had spent the previous nights hunched over her desk repeating basic stuff to someone on the other end. The Sky Team Alliance prices started at about the same price, so we thought we’d give them a try. We had avoided them thinking Star Alliance had them handily beat.
I called Delta the next night and spent over 2 hours on the phone dictating a route we had planned. We used Kayak and Orbitz when Sky Team’s timetables showed no results. You can filter results by alliance at Orbitz.
The woman I was talking to was nice, but it would take her a few minutes to enter flight details and pull up available routes. At the start of the call I told her we would be in London and wanted to start our RTW trip from there. By the end, after 2 long hours, she said I could only start in London if my credit card had a London billing address. The flights she had picked would be available for 72 hours for the US price of $3,969 (plus a few other fees she couldn’t tell me until she actually ran the numbers at the time of payment).
We had read that it wasn’t a problem to start anywhere in the world on some other sites, so this was a little surprising. Starting in London, even with buying our own ticket from Atlanta to London to get started, would have been about $1000 cheaper in total. Another alternative would have been to call a London-based travel agent and have them buy the tickets for us.
Michelle remembered that STA Travel also had a Round-the-World planning service. Their online rtw planning tool is pretty nice and shows you one thing none of the others do: what other destinations can be reached from a given location.
Working with STA Travel can be done online via email. Michelle received a quote for about $4,302, which was in line with the other quotes. They were easy to work with and had a quote to us within 24 hours.
In the end, we decided to find our own routing. Many of the choices made available by Star Alliance involved long layovers (for example, there was a 21 hour layover in a Chinese airport when going from Delhi to Phnom Penh). The next post will discuss how we found and purchased our flights.