Are Round the World Plane Tickets a Good Value?
Source: ToastyKen at flickr
For many years, I have been fascinated with the concept of Round the World (RTW) travel. There are many different ways to do that, and one of the most interesting for me is a “Round the World Plane Ticket”.
That is just as it sounds. For one fixed price, you get to plot a course around the world, across several continents, and have up to one year to take that trip of a lifetime. There used to be a couple of airline groups offering this, but from what I hear, the only one that now does is OneWorld with their OneWorld Explorer and Global Explorer programs.
In the old days, it used to work geographically in that you could book any number of plane tickets as long as they were all going in the same direction (east or west). I used to dream of taking 100 small flights to make my way across Asia and Europe.
Well I guess the airlines caught on to my evil plan, and the updated rules put an upper limit on the number of total flights at 16. But backtracking is now allowed in a limited fashion. Basically, you have to make your way around the world and can only cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans once each.
The whole concept is pretty interesting. You have to tell the airline in advance your itinerary city-by-city, although you can choose your exact dates later.
How much is this going to cost? How much for a single plane ticket that will allow you up to 16 flight segments that allow you to circumnavigate the globe?
3 continents in Economy class works out to $4,500. You can visit 4 continents for a mere $5,100. 5 continents is $5,900, and 6 continents is $6,900. Interesting that the prices are exactly the same in US and Canadian dollars. How often does that happen?
That seems like a pretty good deal. I recently bought a plane ticket for my wife, from Toronto to Manila round trip. The ticket cost over $2,000. So for just over double that, she could have gone to Hawaii, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Australia, New Zealand, New York, Boston and back to Toronto.
Also in the fine print, it seems you can buy more flight segments, up to 2 more per continent at $150 per ticket. So you can have 22 flight segments, for a mere $5,100. That’s only $230 per flight! And some of those are over oceans and connecting continents.
Has anyone ever used a OneWorld round the world ticket? I would be very curious to find out how it went!
I don’t normally do this, but Chris Guillebeau wrote an excellent article on his experiences with RTW tickets. One important tip from Chris’ site is that prices are significantly cheaper if you initially depart from places outside North America. Leaving from Sri Lanka, for instance, is only $2,900 compared to $4,500. That’s a big savings. If you can get to Sri Lanka for less than $1,600.
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