Tickets
I am so not impressed with One World. Their RTW website is terrific, just click on a map and seemingly all your dots are connected. But then when you get to the nitty gritty of picking flights it all goes to hell in a handbag. To get from India to Thailand you have to go via Hong Kong, to go from Thailand to Malaysia, back vou go thru Hong Kong turning an 1 1/2 hr flight into a 9 hr ordeal. Not to mention the constant message “no flights available” meaning you might be stranded in some town for days till a “L” grade seat becomes available. Don’t think we are going to go with this company.
It’s difficult to balance the need for structure with flexibility. With 6 people we may not be able to afford to just jump on a plane at a moment’s notice, especially for the big jumps. On the other hand between Ming and Vincent people may be coming and going at various and random times as we meet up and reconnect. Maybe I should just think of myself and the 3 youngest as one pod and let Vincent and Ming join us as they will. We will probably end up with a skeleton RTW ticket from airtrek which we will fill in with local transport within SEA & SA but it depends on how easy it is to change the itinerary and what the fees will be to do that.
DE desperately wants to go back to his regular summer camp before the trip so that means we can’t leave till August which means it is well & truly only a 12 month trip since we have to arrive back in the states August a year later in order to give us a month to catch our breath and gear up for starting a new school..
Update – as of now, Dec. 2010, we still haven’t bought any tickets but I now think we will just buy the first few leg (NY – London – Estonia) and maybe the flight between China & India. We will be taking trains between Estonia, Russia & China. Once we are in India we will just buy the rest of the tickets as we go along.
Tags: Prep, TIckets, Travel
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