Round the World Ticket

At 113 days to go we've finally achieved a major milestone - agreeing and confirming the Round World Ticket booking with Star Alliance. The tremendous value offered by this 28 member airline alliance was the starting point for us and makes our ambitious expedition feasible. To a limited extent the itinerary has been influenced by the Round the World (RTW) arrangements.

Our Travel Agent (and miracle worker) Jenni has been performing amazing feats of manipulation to minimise the overall cost and stay below the mileage and sector thresholds and going into bat for us with the Star Alliance booking people.

We're pretty amazed that Jenni has got our itinerary pretty much memorised and dreams about it at night (we're not quite sure if they're pleasant ones or nightmares.

RTW tickets are a much cheaper way of arranging international travel (rather than buying separate flights from one destination to another). This concept allows you to fly around the world, usually over a period of up to a year and with up to a maximum of 16 stops (including surface segments) at different airports. There are a number of additional constraints relating mostly to milage and direction travelled. Apparently there is also a limitation on the number of available seats on any particular flight (for RTW travellers).

With 28 separate airlines, covering over 162 countries and 975 destinations, Star Alliance is the champion for sheer number of destinations. The other two airline alliances in the RTW ticket market are the 11-member Oneworld alliance with Skyteam 11 airline alliance running a distant third.

Our RTW ticket consists of the following sectors flying with (all the pictures are hyperlinked):

Air Canada

• Sydney to Vancouver
• Banff to Las Vegas

Continental Airlines

• Las Vegas to New York

United Airlines

• New York to Washington (Colgan Air)
• Washington to Miami (Mesa Air Group)

Lufthansa

• Miami to Frankfurt
• Frankfurt to Istanbul
• Berlin to Frankfurt
• Frankfurt to New Delhi

Aegean Airlines

• Istanbul to Athens
• Athens to Mykonos
• Santorini to Athens

Tyrolean Airways

• Budapest to Vienna

Austrian Airlines

• Vienna to Berlin

Singapore Airlines

• New Delhi to Singapore
• Singapore to Ho Chi Min City

British Airways
(non Star Alliance airline)

• Venice to London
• London to Amsterdam

China Southern Airlines
(non Star Alliance airline)

• Hong Kong to Guangzhou
• Guangzhou to Guilin
• Guilin to Xian

China Eastern Airlines
(non Star Alliance airline)

• Xian to Shanghai 

 

Thai Airways International

• Shanghai to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Chaing Mai
• Chaing Mai to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Sydney

Alaska Airlines

(non Star Alliance airline)

• Seattle to Fairbanks

Vietnam Airlines

(non Star Alliance airline)

• Ho Chi Min to Da Nang
• Da Nang to Hanoi
• Hanoi to Hong Kong

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That's all for now but before you leave,

Have you seen the previous page titled " Planning " yet? (click on the link to take you there)

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