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.
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