Our patience had expired. After dealing with the airlines’ RTW desks for several fruitless hours we were eager to start searching for tickets on our own. We were fairly confident that we could buy tickets to each of the destinations we wanted to visit for less than an official RTW ticket would cost, even factoring in something fairly exotic such as flying to another country and picking up our RTW tickets at that location.
As stated in the previous post, an RTW ticket that included our destinations would cost around $4,000. If we started in London and could manage to stay under 29,000 miles on the SkyTeam plan, tickets would cost about $2,950. We’d have to buy a ticket from Atlanta to London on our own, and that would add about $400-500 for each of us, bringing the total price to $3,350, plus whatever a local agent added to the price for booking it for us. Due to the way SkyTeam had to route their flights, we couldn’t actually achieve our itinerary on anything less than the 34,000 mile plan, which was one of the reasons we opted to look for tickets on our own. Starting the journey in London on the 34,000 mile plan would cost about $4,000 plus the cost of the ticket to get us to London.
Around the time of this writing, Continental Airlines has left the SkyTeam alliance in favor of the Star Alliance, so I’m not sure how that will change things over time.
We bought our tickets over the course of a couple weeks. We did most of the purchasing early in the week, usually late at night. This was partly because those times were convenient, but also because some people advise certain times for buying tickets.
We watched our fares and noted price fluctuations. Once a price had dropped, or at least remained at the level it was when we first started looking, we would open up a few search sites and compare prices. There were sometimes slight variations in price for the same flights, so we’d pick the cheapest (it seemed like Expedia was often a good choice) and make the purchase. Ultimately, we figured that if we could beat the RTW fares we were doing well.
We just recently confirmed the last set of tickets, and our grand total sits at $3,198 per person.
It’s a lot of money, but it gets us around the world, beats the RTW options the alliances have, and we had the freedom to choose from the best flights, regardless of carrier. The amount of time we will spend waiting in airports has been reduced by 6-12 hours due to having better flights to choose from, so this is one of those situations where buying tickets on your own is a better option than buying an RTW ticket.
The only tickets we didn’t actually buy on our own were those on Vietnam Airlines. We used Buffalo Tours to buy our tickets and saved some money. Our searches showed Siem Reap – Hanoi costing $307, but we were able to get that leg for $238. Likewise, Hanoi – Japan was $580 when we searched for it, but the company bought it for $430.