How we “booked” the tickets
October 8th, 2005We discovered many different ways to book or buy airline tickets to take us RTW. I’m sure we haven’t discovered all of them but thought we’d give a description of how we chose ours. We aren’t experts but if you have any additional questions, we’d be happy to throw our 2 cents in.
The first way (and probably the most adventurous) is to simply buy as you go. Book the first ticket to your destination of choice, decide where you want to go next then buy the next ticket. Straight forward. The challenges we saw were:
-getting stuck somewhere with no confirmed reservation to get out
-not being able to decide where to go next
-not being able to avoid high priced tickets
The next way is to use a consolidator. These organizations find the most economical routes to your destinations and book tickets with whatever airline makes the most sense. This can be great because you are not tied into using any particular airline or airline parntership. They also seem to be able to find great rates, especially on RTW itineraries with a smaller number of stops. I’ve had friends who have used consolidators and were very happy with the service. Bootsnall has a great consolidator that was very easy to work with. Unfortunately, we were not able to find a consolidator that could be price competitive for the route we had in mind.
The third way (and the way we went) was to use one of the two major airline partnerships. The two most popular are One World which is an American Airlines partnership and Star Alliacne, a United partnership. I didn’t make Star Allliance a hotlink here because it won’t let you use the browser back button to return to this page.
The major difference we saw between the two are:
-One World charges you by the number of continents you visit
-Star Alliance charges you by the number of mile you fly
We decided to go with the 4 continent ticket from One World because it seems to have a good deal of built in flexibility to change our travel dates if we want. It also seemed to be a better buy for our itinerary.
So we chose One World, studied the “rules” a little bit and started to match up our preferred route with what they could provide. We went through several iterations but eventually settled on a route that will cover most of the areas we want to travel to.
Generally, here is our path:
SE Asia – (Thailand, Singapore, Bali, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) for about 2 months
New Zealand – 6 weeks
Australia – (both coasts) 6 weeks
Europe – (all over the place) 4 months
Central America – (Costa Rica, Belize, Honduras) 2 months
Weiser Wander