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How to buy around the world plane ticket?

Sat, May 23, 2009

Random Travel

A common question for many people setting off for an around-the-world trip is how to deal with the airline tickets. The answer depends a lot on the itinerary and where the person lives. An outsider always thinks such questions before buying a Round The World plane ticket. How does it work? Where can you go? How much does it cost? While for buying simple one way or round trip ticket it’s easy to get that from Kayak.

airline_ticket

I had searched more than 45 hours to know the ins and outs of Round the World travel. In this article I will explain that to you, why round the World tickets can be excellent if you don’t want to visit every country in the world, how to plan your trip, how much it costs.

Always keep in mind that planning and shopping for a Round the World (RTW) ticket is a hard and intensive process.

Before buying a Round the World ticket you must do these things:

For trip read initially for couple of hours. Spend couple of hours on planning and optimizing. Make phone call for setting up the trip. Then make second phone call a few days later after the ticket has been validated. Make adjustments due to lack of availability or invalid routings. Make arrangement to for the ticket with a local office in the originating country.

Above-mentioned tips are the minimum time costs to set up the Round the World trip. Beware of that RTW ticket is up to full year. so taking time for planning is best and so much important.

Reasons to use the Round The World Tickets

around the world ticket available

There are several good reasons to use the Round the World Tickets. Because benefits you will receive from using these kinds of tickets are significant. The tickets are not only cheap but also well-optimized ticket can provide value far beyond what it will cost to otherwise buy round trip tickets. Change of flights all the time is easy. You can make changes in date and time that’s free and you can do that any time. Before day of your departure you can totally re route your whole trip for fee. You are given whole entire year to use the ticket. Through RTW you can get highest-level status in various airlines. You can get a lot of places in world with simple round-trip tickets, while if you use regular tickets it will become too expensive.

How Round the World Ticket Works

Every airline company has its own rules for how the ticket works. The one from Star Alliance is mileage based means you will be having limit of 26,000, 29,000, 34,000 or 39,000 miles on your ticket. By having that mileage on your ticket you can utilize that trip in best way.

The One World product is segment based. Its means that flight from Hong Kong to New York (11 hours) is the same as flight from Chicago to Dallas (less than 2 hours). There can be up to 16 segments on the trip and obviously you will optimize for flights, which will be fairly expensive while purchasing a standard ticket. A fairly basic RTW ticket can have so much of benefits and travel opportunities, which you cannot have on ordinary round trip ticket.

Cost of Round the World Ticket

The cost of RTW tickets varies from 3,000$ to 10,000$ it depends on travel class, mileage tier and where you begin the trip from. That looks a lot of money, but price per segment goes way down if you look on long flights, which can cost thousands of dollars on other ordinary tickets.

For example here is an itinerary:

NRT-HKG-LAX-SJO-LAX-ORD-SEA-JFK-SCL-IPC-SCL-EZE-ORD-AMM-TUN-AMM-FCO-HKG-NRT

This itinerary includes a trip from Easter Island, usually that’s very expensive to go there on ordinary one-way ticket through South America on LAN Chile. There is visit to North Africa and the Middle East that’s also pricey region. A quick trip down to Costa Rica that provides more miles than most U.S. flights would have offered. Return to Seattle where you can stop and break up the trip for while. Base mileage of 54,894 miles, which will be added to a number of bonuses that you will receive, will be approximately 100,000 total award miles. When combined with overland trips on location you get chance to visit 10 countries on this one ticket.

Advantages of Round the World Ticket

You can get best advantage from RTW ticket by departing from a specific countries where is so much lower than leaving from North America or Europe. These countries from where you can avail this advantage or bonus on your RTW ticket changes time to time while this time for that best places are South Africa, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Mauritius and Korea.

It needs some search to go on those places. If you don’t mind to pay a little more around 2000$ to 4000$ you can begin from North America or wherever else you live.

Final Two Steps for Buying Round the World Ticket

Make phone call in your itinerary that will take almost half an hour that you get someone on phone. It’s much easier with One World because they have the dedicated RTW desk operated by American Airlines. While with Star Alliance airlines it’s complicated because you have to talk with several people to find someone who knows how to create the itinerary in their system.

Second thing is payment of RTW ticket. If you are in the U.S. then you will pay when your ticket will be “rated” by airline desk for this you will have to wait for few days after first phone call in itinerary, and then call back to pay with your credit card.

If you are in any other country then it’s little complicated. In some cases you will need to phone the airline’s office in that country. Some airline reps are more helpful while doing this but there can be a language problem also. You will need to be patient if it take little long, but you can get lucky also when its done in 20 minutes on the right day.

When it comes to Round the World tickets its better to buy it from airlines instead of any traveling agent or any other reseller.

At end its best to have RTW ticket because from one ticket you get a lot. Have a nice trip.

 

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