Round the World Travel Planning and Booking Tips
Adventures in Family Land work with affiliate advertising programs to provide a means for our site to earn an income. This article may contain affiliate links to products or websites. We are also a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.Home » Travel Tales »
| Table of Contents |
Round the World Travel Planning and Booking Tips
We’ve made a list of some of the round the world travel planning tips that helped us with our round the world (RTW) booking, and, as we’re always planning new adventures, we’ll add more as and when…
What is a Round The World (RTW) flight?
A round the world flight is a code-share between different airlines which, quite simply, flies you around the world. Mainly based on mileage or sections, there are various options, such as The Great Escapade, Star Alliance and One World Explorer. Some agents will even do full round the world trip packages with accommodation included.
How much will an around the world ticket cost?
How long is a piece of string? It completely depends where you’re going and the time of year – huge savings can be had by travelling in the low season.
Who with and how should you book these flights?
Personally, I think you’re generally better using a specialist RTW agent to book. Generic high street travel agents most often won’t do you the same deals as RTW specialists.
We used www.roundtheworldflights.com. They beat everyone on price and did the exact route we wanted, when others had said it wasn’t possible. No fuss, great advice. Simply fab and would have used them as an around the world travel agency again, every time, however it looks like covid has struck, the company has folded and they disappeared with people’s money. Simply awful behaviour from them.
Yes, you can book all the flights yourself, but if you find the right agent (sorry, but there’s some terrible ones out there, even our good one turned bad for others!), they’ll get you it cheaper.
Do your own RTW trip research first
Before you go near any agents, have a rough idea at least of where you want to go and which dates. Your agent isn’t a mind reader. Some RTW flight agents have websites where you can plan rough routes, so have a play first and get some ideas. Use Skyscanner to get a feel of routes and prices or have a look on Expedia too.
And, not forgetting WHERE do you want to go?! That’s pretty important! Get the whole family involved too – where do the kids want to go? Great ideas book for kids and grown ups on Amazon.
I’d already planned pretty much our whole route to within days and hours and had a rough price before I contacted any agents. I couldn’t get the flights I wanted any cheaper separately than my agent got us in the end. One agent also told us that the flights I wanted were impossible. He was trying to sell us flights on an inferior airline. I wasn’t impressed. This wasn’t remotely true as the agent we eventually booked with sorted the flight and airline I wanted with no issues!
ALWAYS do your own research!!
Use an online calendar to plan dates
If you’re planning at least some of your round the world trip before you leave, Google Calendar can be invaluable when planning where to go (I used this for the whole trip!), your different accommodations and tickets and tours. It’s easiest using ‘month’ view, and you are able to add, delete, drag and drop, move and edit your transport and travel plans, where you want to stay and attractions you want to visit with ease. It also enables you to share your calendar with friends and family, so they can see what you’re up to and when.
Our actual online RTW calendar for the month of Sept ’16 is below to show you how it can work…
Put your plans into a spreadsheet
It doesn’t have to be a work of mathematical genius, just get your plans down on the screen so you can see costs adding up. Include flights, insurance and car hire, then for each place include accommodation, food, attractions and transport. Then input your estimates and try and stay under them.
*TIP: Not got Excel? We personally use Apache OpenOffice. It’s open-source office software and best of all it’s totally FREE! Head over to www.openoffice.org to get yourself this great software.
EDIT: I’ve now moved everything over to Google Sheets as it means we can access our documents wherever we are, but I’ll leave the Apache OpenOffice info in just incase you prefer that!
Use the internet to your advantage
When I went around the world on my own back in the nineties, it was planned by word of mouth and Lonely Planet books. These days, the internet is a wealth of information. One of the main sites is TripAdvisor, whether it be for restaurant, hotel or attraction reviews. Use it – and its forum – to get a good idea of where you want to head and where you want to book.
TIP: I mentioned I used Lonely Planet books back in the nineties, and they are still just as relevant today. We bought a few before our trip, and the best thing these days is that you can get ebooks. Yay, no carrying chunky books in your luggage!
Make notes of all your ideas
You’ll be amazed at how many things you forget while hunting the internet constantly for ideas. Take screenshots on your phone and/or computer so you can refer back to them. You can always pop ideas into your Google Calendar too, then move them around as you need to.
If you’re old school, write everything that pops into your head down in a simple notebook. Plenty here on Amazon.
Shop about for around the world trip packages
Don’t feel like you have to be loyal to any particular company – ring them all up. It’s YOUR trip, and you want the best deal for YOU!
There are so many flight options available that your head could be on the verge of exploding with too much information – airlines, airport codes, times, dates, changes, baggage etc, etc. Let someone who knows what they are doing do all the hard work for you. Whether you then book with them is up to you.
Skyscanner is one of the best tools for playing around with flight dates and prices to pre-arm yourself. Don’t take the prices you see initially as gospel, remember baggage fees etc.
Remember that ‘cheaper’ isn’t always better
For the sake of saving £10, £20 or £50 on a flight, is it worth dragging out your journey with an extra stopover, or landing past midnight when local transport has stopped? You can make the budget deficit up somewhere else. The flights are one area I, personally, wouldn’t scrimp too much on, especially if you have kids in tow.
It’s all well and good getting a cheap deal, but does that mean you’ll be landing at 11pm in a city you’ve never been to? If the flight is on time, factor in getting off the plane, collecting bags, and getting to your accommodation, and that’s if you’ve pre-booked. Is it worth paying a touch more to land at a better time? Yep!
Check the price of flight changes
If you think you’ll possibly be changing dates while on your trip, please check how much it is to change your flights WITH THE AIRLINE before you book. The (bad) agent might tell you flight changes are free, but they may not be free with the airline itself. Beware!
See our RTW booking experience further down the page for further details of the flight change cost issue as we had an agent trying to tell us changes were free when they weren’t at all. Luckily I’d already come across this when I was 18 – many years ago!!
Be flexible…
If you are flexible on dates and times, you can save yourself some substantial money on flights, transport and accommodation. If you travel in low season rather than high season, you’ll potentially save thousands of pounds overall.
Be a bit flexible with routes if cost is a factor, but equally don’t sacrifice the places that are important to you. There is ALWAYS a route that will get you where you want to go, but you might have to adapt your plans.
…BUT don’t give up all your options to save a few quid!
Don’t be too stingy with yourself. For example, say you’d love to go to San Francisco on your RTW flight path, but it’s going to cost you an extra £50/$50, ask yourself ‘Am I ever going to be in that area of the world again?’. No? Pay the extra £50!
Alternatively, it was going to cost us just short of £1000 extra to go on a quick visit to Niagara Falls from New York. We realised it wouldn’t be much dearer and less rushed to wait for a deal when we got home, from Manchester to Toronto, and turn it into a city break.
You might only do this once. Figure out what’s worth it to you.
Not quite happy? Don’t book it
Sometimes you just need to go with your gut. As the header says, if you’re not happy, don’t book it. Have a look at our experience linked below.
An around the world travel agency can hold flights for up to a week or so for you. Taxes might change slightly but the RTW fares generally won’t. If they’re pressuring you, go elsewhere. DON’T BE PRESSURED!
Don’t forget travel insurance
As soon as you’ve booked your flights GET TRAVEL INSURANCE! You’re paying a lot for these flights and for your trip. Get covered should anything bad happen and make sure it’s DECENT cover for your needs. That is all!
I’ve always had it, but never used it, until I was in Mexico a couple of years ago. Holy moly was I ill. I’d have paid ANYTHING for the doctor to fix me. Thankfully an injection in my bum and some crazy pills sorted me out til I could get home two days later. The cost went on credit card and I got it all back when I got home. I’d have been hundreds out of pocket otherwise. Imagine a really serious accident though and the spiralling costs? You’ll most likely have seen the begging posts on social media of people without insurance trying to get home… shall say no more.
TIP: Think about what you, personally, need. We chose LV recently for long stay cover. It’s defaqto 5 star rated and it was one of the only ones which included a decent amount of cancellation cover. We paid for most of the accommodation before we travelled, so good cancellation cover was a massive ‘must’. LV also didn’t charge extra for existing medical conditions yet still provided full cover. It was by far one of the cheapest we looked at – bonus!
TIP: You may also find you can’t get ‘Gap Year’ cover with an under 18 travelling with you, so opt for ‘Long Stay’ instead.
Finally… Just enjoy yourself! 😉
Our round the world flight booking experience…
We thought we’d let you know how we went about booking our around the world (RTW) flights incase you are thinking of doing the same.
The flights we finally decided on (after lots of changing of minds!) were: Manchester – New York (via London), New York – San Francisco, Overland to Los Angeles, Los Angeles – Melbourne, Overland to Brisbane, Brisbane – Auckland, Overland to Christchurch, Christchurch – Singapore, Singapore – Phuket (return), Singapore – Manchester.
With some research, we found this itinerary fit roughly into two of the more popular RTW fares – The Great Escapade and the Emirates/Qantas Alliance. I’d already priced the flights individually at approx £5800 (don’t fall off your chairs!) through Skyscanner, so expected the RTW agents to be much cheaper. Not many were.
I can hear you asking if I priced the flights cheaper than the travel agents, why didn’t I book myself? There were various reasons, which I’ll explain…
Firstly, in previous years, having booked both many individual flights and also a RTW ticket, we felt the RTW flights suited us better on this occasion, so this was the way we wanted to go. I’d simply priced the flights individually to get a rough idea of a price to beat.
Secondly, if you book a RTW fare, it means it’s on one ticket – if you ever miss a connection due to the first flight being delayed, you’re covered to an extent. If it was just the two of us I would have considered booking the flights myself, but didn’t want to be struggling with a tired three-year-old if I’d messed up with a flight.
The third reason was that the flights I’d priced were a total mismatch of different airlines, some not so good, so a RTW fare would give us better airlines for roughly the same price, hopefully less.
Now, I appreciate it can also be dependent on the individual you speak to, but I will say that the majority of the RTW flight companies we spoke to prior to booking, tried either the hard-sell, twisted the truth to us to try and get a booking early, or tried to get us to reroute to an itinerary we didn’t want.
Don’t let them do it to you. Walk away and use someone else to spend your hard-earned cash with.
As a little aside, please don’t get caught out on this one if you’re planning to book RTW flights and your return dates have yet to be released…
When we originally started looking, our return flight dates hadn’t been released yet – airlines generally only release fares a year(ish) in advance. We were told on many occasions (not by who we eventually booked with!) that we could book dummy dates for our return trip, then change them for ‘FREE’ when the flights were released. Not true. The agents themselves may not charge to change the dates, but some airlines do charge.
You can buy fares that allow you changes with the airline for free, as my last RTW ticket was, but ours wasn’t going to be one of them. What we would, in fact, have to do, would be to book these dummy dates, then when the fares were released, we’d have to ring the airlines and be charged anywhere between £50-100 EACH for EACH flight change. Bear in mind this would have involved at least four flight changes towards the end of our trip, we would have been looking at a minimum of £600 extra on top of our original flight prices.
As you can imagine, I was pretty disgusted by being repeatedly told this twisted version of the truth for the sake of someone’s commission.
After ringing many agents and airlines direct, we eventually decided on ‘Company A’, as we were able to visit their local office. I’m not going to name them, as I’m not here to bash anyone over the internet. They told us to expect to pay approx £1700 for us and £1400 for little man, so £4800 total. They said we couldn’t book til March (due to return flights not being released), but not to worry as the prices wouldn’t change much. Ha! See above!!
We went to the office in March, all excited and ready to book. We sat there for over two hours and the price eventually came out at £5100, and that didn’t even include all the flights. We’d have to add a few flights of our own, which would add up to at least £800 extra – so a minimum total of £5800. In addition to the extra flights we’d have to book (they never offered to book them for us), we weren’t happy with the first flight – it was a tin can with horrendous reviews over to New York. We left feeling a bit deflated and went away to think about it.
For the previous few months, we’d never wavered and definitely wanted to book with ‘Company A’. Now I was wavering. Just a little niggle. Everyone was pretty much saying to just book it. Nope. I was like a dog with a bone. I just wasn’t happy. I’d been told certain routes on certain airlines were simply not possible, when I knew full well they were. (I’ll be truthful, ‘Company A’ had previously told me a certain route wasn’t available when we were trying to book another trip, so we went elsewhere then too, but I thought I’d finally found someone within the company who sounded knowledgeable.)
I had another mooch on t’internet, then rang Geoff at www.roundtheworldflights.com – Bingo! No messing, no hassle, Geoff booked every flight we wanted, on our preferred airlines, with better arrival/departure times and less indirect flights than ‘Company A’. Where we’d been told we couldn’t do certain routes previously, Geoff did it for us.
We were not in any way affiliated with www.roundtheworldflights.com, Geoff just provided us the best price, service and itinerary, hence recommending them. Unfortunately, covid took hold of the company and they have since folded. A true shame as they’ve even had their own blogs for further info, and a handy, exclusive and free ebook was also available for download from their website.
Our base RTW ticket was The Great Escapade (an alliance between Virgin Atlantic, Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines), and our additional flights (enabling us to do the route we wanted) were with Delta, Air Asia and Emirates, with a couple of last minute additions from us using Southwest and Virgin Australia too. The final price came in at roughly £5500 for the three of us.
WHAT?! I hear you say. But think about it… firstly, we didn’t travel in low season. It would have been a fair bit cheaper if we did. Secondly, we did a bit of a mis-match backwards route which pushed us up into the next price tier. Lastly, if you break it all down, we had twelve flights each, for three people, on good airlines, and we actually got exactly what we wanted and was still cheaper than the individual flights I’d priced. Bargain!
Anyway, we’re back from our adventure now, and didn’t have any problems at all with our airlines or routings at all, apart from two trashed bags, but that’s another story! I’d highly recommend a RTW fare if you’re having an adventure of a lifetime!
Adventures in Family Land work with affiliate advertising programs to provide a means for our site to earn an income. This article may contain affiliate links to products or websites. We are also a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
