Our Plan of Attack

We finally have all of our early flights booked… and not a moment too soon. The big drawback to booking the RTW ticket out of the UK is that we had to buy a one-way ticket from San Francisco to London. I had been keeping my eye on the flight prices which were pretty reasonable last month, but lately have been creeping up in cost. Fortunately we found a one way special on United Airlines which happens to also be a non-stop flight: Sweet.

Now that we are locked in for a departure date (May 26th), I can get a solid travel itinerary in place. Note: Since all of the flights can be changed easily, we don’t have to (and probably won’t) stick to this itinerary 100% of the time…

Spain (35 Nights)

Madrid (4 nights)
Tue, May 26 2009: (SFO -> LHR)
Wed, May 27 2009: (LHR -> MAD)

First leg of the trip: We book our own flights from SFO to Spain, as the OneWorld Explorer ticket starts from London.

Toledo (1 night)

From Madrid, head to Toledo and stay overnight.

Andalusia (10 nights)

Grenada / Córdoba / Seville / Gibraltar

Barcelona (7 nights)

Basque Country (7 nights)

Pamplona (2) / San Sebastián (3) / Bilbao (2)

Cantabria / Castile-LeÓn (5 nights)

Santander (2) / Salamanca (2) / in route to Madrid, stop in Ávila (1)

Madrid (1 night)

Stay overnight near the airport to catch an early flight.

U.S. East Coast (14 Nights)

New York, New York (7 Nights)
Wed, July 1 2009: (BCN -> LHR)
Wed, July 1 2009: (LHR -> JFK)

Entry point to the East Coast: First flight using the One World Explorer Pass, since we technically start in London. Visit Dawn Camner, 4^th of July in the states. Drag Sun-D up from Washington DC.

Washington DC (3 nights)
Wed, July 8 2009: (JFK -> IAD)

Visit Sean Donato.

Raleigh, North Carolina (4 nights)
Sat, July 11 2009: (IAD -> RDU)

Visit Bob, Steph, and Cate… Spend a long weekend in RTP catching up.

Central America (37 Nights)

Cancun, Mexico (0 Nights)
Wed, July 15 2009: (RDU -> JFK)
Wed, July 15 2009: (JFK -> CUN)

Entry point to Mexico and Central America: Launching point to the Pacific coast.

Zihuatanejo, Mexico (7 nights)

Beaches, deap sea fishings, Ixtapa…

Hualtulco, Mexico (7 Nights)

Beaches and surfing...

Havana, Cuba (10 Nights)

TBD

Belize & Guatemala (11 Nights)

Ambergris Caye (6 Nights): off the coast to hang out and dive/snorkel.
Cayo, San Ignacio (4 Nights): Exploring caves and underground rivers… Rainforest.
Tikal, Guatamala (2 Night): Explore Mayan ruins. 2^nd night might be spent in Belize to get ready to catch flight back to Miami.

Miami, Florida (3 Nights)
Fri, Aug 21, 2009: (CUN -> MIA)

Visit Gina Spencer, etc all…

South America (68 Nights)

Lima, Peru (1 Night)
Mon, Aug 24 2009: (MIA -> LIM)

Entry point to Peru… Get acclimated to the time zone.

Cusco, Peru (4 Nights)

TBD

Aguas Calientes, Peru (1 Night)

Hike around Machu Picchu… Just stay overnight.

Puno, Peru (6 Nights)

Lake Titicaca.

Arequipa (2 Nights)

Lima (1 NIGHT)

Overnight to catch a flight the next day.

Buenos Aires, Argentina (25 Nights)
Wed, Sep 9 2009: (LIM -> EZE)

Entry point to Argentina: TBD… 25 nights in Argentina.

Santiago, Chile (27 Nights)
Sun, Oct 4 2009: (EZE -> SCL)

Entry point to Chile: TBD… 27 nights in Chile.

New Zealand / Australia (46 Nights)

Aukland (2 Nights)
Sat, Oct 31 2009: (SCL -> AKL)

Entry point to New Zealand and the South Pacific: No time actually spent here… 2 nights lost on the plane ride over the international date line.

Raratonga, Cook Islands (7 Nights)

Relax on the beach.

New Zealand South Island (20 Nights)

Sydney, Australia (7 Nights)
Sun, Nov 29 2009: (AKL -> SYD)

Entry point to Australia: We might cut this short and spread more time out between New Zealand and Cairns.

Cairns, Australia (10 Nights)
Sun, Dec 6 2009: (SYD -> CNS)

Great Barrier Reef

Southeast Asia (68 Nights)

Hong Kong (2 Nights)
Wed, Dec 16 2009: (CNS -> HKG)

Skip over Shanghai… Get Ward to meet us out in the Philippines.

Cebu, Philippines (19 Nights)
Fri, Dec 18 2009: (HKG –> CEB)

TBD: Need to refine this part…

Bangkok, Thailand (1 Night)
Wed, Jan 6 2010: (CEB -> HKG)
Wed, Jan 6 2010: (HKG -> BKK)

Entry point to Vietnam, Laos, Thailand.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (12 Nights)

TBD: 2 weeks? Need to figure out where to go.

Hanoi, Vietnam (12 Nights)

TBD: 2 weeks? Need to figure out where to go.

Laos (11 Nights)

TBD: 1.5 week in Laos (per Rod’s reccomendation).

Phuket, Thailand (11 Nights)

We may not actually go here, but we’ll go to some beaches outside of Phuket.

MOROCCO (23 Nights)

London, United Kingdom (2 Nights)
Tue, Feb 23, 2010: (BKK -> LHR)

this is the last leg of our round-the-world air pass… and we are required to end it in London. Get acclimated to the new time zone here, and use the time to plan our return route and book itinerary for Europe and Morocco. London should be an easy spot to book discount flights to Turkey, Croatia, Morocco, etc.

Morocco (21 Nights)

Eastern Mediterranean (35 Nights)

Turkey (21 Nights)

TBD… where to go in Turkey?

Greek Islands (14 Nights)

Just the islands… TBD with Croatia

Eastern Europe (39 Nights)

Croatia / Slovenia (18 Nights)

Need to determine split between Croatia / Slovenia / rest of Eastern Europe.

Prague, Czech Republic (7 Nights)

Budapest, Hungary (7 Nights)

St. Petersburg, Russia (7 Nights)

time and weather permitting…

London & Back (1 Night)

Head back home

Tags: RTW,Itinerary

It’s never simple

So we finally got our new credit cards in the mail on Friday, and not a moment too soon as the RTW tickets had a promotional 10% off discount until the weekend (April 12th). I was now set to go ahead and book our OneWorld Explorer tickets. I have been using the online tool to plan the stops and flight dates, so I already had a pretty good idea of what I needed to book. The only problem that I found was that the online booking tool was quite buggy so I actually had to talk to a person.

I called the American Airlines Round the World booking desk, but unfortunately they were already closed as they are based in Dallas (I think). No problem, I would just have to call them first thing on Saturday. When I call on Saturday morning, I get a fairly stressed AA representative on the phone. He explains to me that he can take the itinerary, but that I would have to call back later in the afternoon to book and pay for the flight. Turns out I wasn’t the only one to wait until the last minute to book our flights before the discount expired.

After some coffee and lunch I call back to confirm my booking. The guy on the line tells me that everything is set, all my flights are available, and that the total price would be $5k per person. $5k per person!!! I was flabbergasted, as I had specifically asked at least 3 times to different AA reps that the price quoted to me earlier in Pounds was the price I would be charged. The guy on the line told me that I had to live in the UK and have a UK Visa credit card to get that price.

I hung up and fumed for the better part of 10 hours that evening trying to figure out what happened and how I could work around this. I did not want to just pay the US price in dollars as that would add at least $4,000 to our airfare bill. We looked over the fine print in the technical rules document, and sure enough there was a screw-you clause that let them charge me the highest price:

“When travel originates in a country for which a specific local currency fares is published and the ticket is sold
in another country, the fare will be that published for the country of origin converted to the currency of the
country of sale at the bank selling rate. The resultant fare must not be lower than from the country of sale.
Exception: Not applicable for sales made and/or travel originating in Canada or when BOTH travel
originates and sales are made within the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA).”

Gotta love American Airlines for sticking it to their US based customers and charging them 2x the price for the exact same flights. The only think that I could think of was to either try to get someone we knew in the UK to purchase the tickets for us or find a UK based travel agent to broker the deal in our behalf. We had friends in the UK who could do this for us, but sending them 4k GBP would be difficult and expensive with transaction fees. We found some UK travel agencies that offer OneWorld Explorer products but it looked like they charged a 200 Pound commission for simply relaying our flight details to American Airlines. So be it. The travel agency was not going to be open until 11am London time as it was Easter Sunday(!) there… so I would have to call long distance at 3am pacific time and hope that with all the delays we would still get the 10% discount. I set up a skype account to do my long distance call (needed to set this up anyway), and tried to stay awake.

The funny thing is that I know that other people have done the exact same thing as this before with no problems: People buy UK RTW tickets all the time. I decided that I would to find an American Airlines booking phone number with a UK country code prefix and see if I could still book it myself. After about 20 minutes of searching I found the phone number and called. It was easy… I mean the whole transaction was done in 20 minutes and total cost was even less than the online price quote. This even included all taxes, fuel surcharges, and a 15 GBP reservation fee for booking with Tatyana, the pleasant booking agent in London. Total price: 4111 GBP ($6,150 USD) for 2 people for a 16 segment flight around the world. Not a bad deal. We were even able to sneak in and get the 10% discount on its last day. So it’s REALLY official now… we are almost set to begin.

Technorati Tags: RTW,OneWorld Explorer,Airfare,Skype,American Airlines

Buying airline tickets

We started researching airline tickets pretty early on in our planning process, as this was going to be one of the bigger ticket ($$$) items. There are many different ways to get around the globe, and the thought of organizing all of the transportation ourselves was initially quite daunting. Thankfully there is a lot of helpful advice on the good old information-superhighway… Some common recommendation:

• Buy one way tickets as you go… Obviously the most flexible alternative as you decide where to go and how to get there.
• Have a travel agent string together a sequence of one way tickets… This might be the cheapest alternative, as a travel agent has experience putting these together and can find the cheapest flights. This is the least flexible option.
• Buy a Round the World (RTW) ticket from a global airline alliance… This is kind of a mixture of the two options above. You buy the tickets directly from the airline travel desk.

I don’t think that we ever seriously considered buying one way tickets or fixed date tickets from a travel agent. Both options seem either too scary (I don’t have a flight out of here?), or too limiting (can’t change dates?). Meanwhile the RTW tickets typically allow you to change flight dates and times at no extra cost, so this seemed seemed like the best value for us. There are quite a few global airline alliances out there, with Sky Team, One World, and Star Alliance being the largest providers. We really only had one realistic option which was to buy a ticket through the OneWorld Alliance. They were the only carrier group that had a South American presence.

One World has two different ticket types: OneWorld Explorer and Global Explorer.

The Global Explorer program prices their tickets based on total mileage traveled on the trip. This is the most common way of pricing these things across all alliances, with pricing tiers at 29k, 34k, 39k miles. It gives you a maximum 0f 15flight segments including overland routes. This ticket offers a little bit more options for flights, as it includes all codeshare partners, such as Air Tahiti Nui. This is the ticket to use if one wants to get to Tahiti, or travel from Australia to Indonesia directly(JetStar).

The OneWorld Explorer is unique in that it does not charge for mileage at all… rather it tiers its prices based on the number of continents/zones that are traveled through. There are pricing tiers for 3/4/5/6 continents, with each continent allowing 4 stops (max 16 flight segments). This is obviously quite flexible and I think the most popular option that people go with.

We ended up deciding on the 5 continent OneWorld Explorer ticket as it was the easiest to work with, and (at the time of this writing) was under a promotional 10% discount. One quirk of the system is that it is FAR cheaper to book these tickets as anyone but an American. Specifically speaking, the price out of the UK is about 50% cheaper due to USD->GBP exchange rates and competition from other providers there. It seems the Americans are royally screwed for pricing as not many people in the US take these type of trips. There are a few caveat to getting the ticket at the UK rate: First, you have to start and end you trip in the UK, so there is the added cost of getting to and from London. This is not really a big deal, as one way flights to London from SFO only cost about $300-$400 USD. Second, we have to buy the tickets in Pounds so we are currently waiting on a Visa credit card that does not charge foreign transaction fees or percentage points. Hopefully it gets here before the 10% sale ends.

There are some major drawbacks that we will have to overcome with the RTW ticket. As stated above, we have to fly to and from London on our own dime. This is an added cost that we’ll have to deal with. Also, the ticket limits us to use flights within the carrier group, so some routes to get from A to B are quite out of the way. For example, to get from Mexico to Peru we have to fly back to Miami, as American Airlines is the carrier connecting the two spots (and this counts as two flight segments). Probably the biggest limitation is that we have a limit of 16 total flight segments. This limits us to mostly connecting up through major hubs and booking side flights and trips separately. I don’t think that this is too bad though, as there are a lot of discount air carriers in Europe, Asia and America that we can book relatively cheaply… We’ll limit the RTW ticket to the expensive long haul and trans-oceanic routes.

Technorati Tags: RTW,OneWorld Explorer,Airfare

So… Where are we going, again?

Many people ask us how we decided on our itinerary… basically we went straight to the expert: Rod Schultz. Rod lives his life by day as a software engineer, but by night he feeds his inner desire to travel the world by researching cool places to visit. If he had to, he could probably quit his job and become a travel agent.

Rod suggested that we take two pieces of paper and independently make lists of places that we would like to see. When we were done, we compared lists and tried to string together places that we had common interests in. It wasn’t failsafe and some negotiating was required to ensure truly important places were covered (Ana: Spain, Rich: Croatia), but it was a good starting point. We came up with this rough list:

• Mexico
• Spain
• Portugal
• Morocco
• Turkey
• Greece
• Australia
• Vietnam
• Peru
• Argentina
• Chile
• Prague
• Russia

The truly difficult part from here was figuring out when to go and how long to stay at each place. We had two general strategies to choose from:

1. Go native for extended stretches of time. This would entail picking fewer places to see, but would enable us to not be on the move as much and we would get a much more immersive experience. 
   Pros: Cheaper. Less Traveling. A better feel for each place.
   Cons: Not as many places visited. Potential boredom if there is not enough to do.
2. Go exploring, visit as many places as we were interested in. This strategy kind of involves us planning our trip as a giant extended vacation.
   Pros: More places seen. Possibly more exciting.
   Cons: More Expensive. Limited to hotels for many stops. More time in transit. Potential burnout.

I think (at least from reading other’s blogs) that most people who do this kind of thing go with option 1. It’s definitely cheaper. It allows one to potentially work while abroad, and forces one to get accustomed to the culture of the place visited. As a bit of a surprise to even us we opted to go with option 2, with the notion that if we ever got burned out along the way we would just stop and reevaluate our plans. It seemed (and still seems) like a good compromise. I say, better to plan too much to do and skip things than to not plan enough and get frustrated with each other (yes, this is speaking from experience).

The decision of when to go to where was determined by two things: climate and airfare. The climate was something that we wanted to research up front… We did not want to be in Russia in the middle of winter, or camp out in Southeast Asia in the middle of monsoon season. To visualize the different limitations of the places we were considering, Ana and I made a spreadsheet (geek alert!) of the places and the average temperature and rainfall for the different months of the year. This made it pretty obvious that our some of our initial legs should be in the southern hemisphere. We were leaving in June (friend’s wedding in May), and we wanted to avoid the heat and crowds in Europe during the peak season. The rest of the order was determined by the type of plane tickets we purchased. We decided to go with a Round the World ticket since it had a good balance of price and flexibility, but this forced to basically continue travelling on one direction. Our new rough itinerary looked like this: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Raratonga, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Russia… Generally we were heading west.

How we got here

Where to begin? About a year ago, I had gotten a wild hair and figured that I wanted to shake up the corporate routine and go back to school. My career was starting to stall, and I was intrigued by the idea of pushing the reset button and doing something completely different.

Pros: New Career, learning new things, Join an industry in its infancy
Cons: Graduate School at age 35(!), Much lost $$$ in income

I decided to go for it, and with some encouragement of my friends and colleagues applied to two local graduate programs. Unfortunately for me, I was applying at the ripe-old age of 35 to two of the most prestigous schools in the country in the middle of the greatest recession in almost 80 years. Predictably, I did not get accepted. Fortunately, I had a backup plan.

Traveling is something that Ana and I do every now and again… not often enough to be considered seasoned travelers, but we’ve gotten around the world a bit. Ana is usually the one who gets the travel bug, and about once a year she propositions me to sell all of our possessions and travel the world. She’s been doing this for about 8 years now, but I never take her seriously: Until now. I am calling her bluff this year, and to my surprise, she did not flinch even a tinsy bit: she hasn’t been bluffing all these years!

So now we begin the long complicated task of planning our trip. We’re not selling the house and all of our possessions: It turns out the combination of potential graduate school and the global financial meltdown had us saving cold hard cash for a while. It’s exciting to think that this is really happening and there’s a bit of hindsight nostalgia going on here (starting the blog after the fact), but there’s actual a lot of work left in planning and logistics. The grind! Planning process and itinerary to come…

Technorati Tags: RTW,Travel,Planning,Round the world