A complete guide to booking around-the-world tickets 

We had our good friends Bob and Jo visiting us for lunch during one weekend. They were soon getting married and were thinking of doing a mini-world trip for their honeymoon. Such an exciting and interesting way to start their married life!  Once they’d left, Mrs Nomad looked at me and said – ‘Hey how about we start our early retired and nomadic life with a world trip?’ Sounded like a great idea! What a way it would be do celebrate the early retirement … and our big 50^th birthday milestones … in different spectacular parts of the world!! Before we knew it, the rest of the weekend – and many more subsequent weekends – were spent on going down the rabbit hole of planning the travel, selecting destinations, evaluating the ‘round-the-world-tickets’ and finalizing our plans.

In this article we’ve tried to provide you with a guide to the ‘round-the-world’ tickets, their benefits, constraints, price ranges, guidelines, and tips to setup your dream itinerary.  

What are ‘Round-The-World’ (RTW) tickets? 

As the name says, these are flight tickets that let you fly around the world at a relatively lower price (compared to standard one-way/return flights to the same destinations) while also providing the travel flexibility. With the RTW tickets, you can fly around the globe starting and ending the trip from your base country while stopping at multiple destinations based on your custom itinerary.

Most airline alliances (Star Alliance, OneWorld, SkyTeam) offer these RTW tickets and some airlines also allow to buy these tickets using their air-miles.  

How much do these RTW tickets cost? 

The RTW tickets are typically calculated by the number of miles flown. While planning our own trip, we found that the price of a single RTW ticket was in the range of: 

The above range is in US Dollars however the RTW ticket is priced in the currency of the origin country of travel.  A RTW business class ticket of our dream itinerary of 11 destinations starting from Singapore cost us 16,000SGD (12,000USD) for each.   

Benefits of a RTW ticket 

I think the RTW is the best and the most convenient way to travel around the world while visiting your dream destinations. Some definite benefits that we found (comparing to booking same flights with different airlines): 

• Price: The RTW tickets are definitely cheaper than the standard one-way / return ticket to the same destinations booked separately, as the RTW price is calculated on the number of miles flown. So, you also don’t need to worry about the higher fares, peak seasons etc. while making changes to the tickets.  
• Flexibility:  The RTW ticket also provides a lot more flexibility on the date, destination, and the route changes. For example, the tickets we bought using Star Alliance, allows us to make any number of date changes free of cost while changes to the destinations cost a mere 125$. 
• Tailored itinerary: You are the master of your own itinerary and can build your dream world trip. You can decide to see the natural wonders, architectural hotspots, chase summer throughout the year, see all the big cities – the world is your oyster! Star Alliance even has some suggested itineraries to inspire you https://www.staralliance.com/EN/travel-inspiration

Can miles be used to purchase the RTW tickets? 

A few airlines do offer the RTW tickets using miles. Worth checking with the airline you have your miles with.   We are Singapore Airlines’ frequent flyer and they offer: 

We found the RTW ticket using miles is a lot more restrictive. For instance, an RTW ticket bought from Singapore Airlines Krisflyer miles doesn’t allow any date, destination, or route changes. This was deal-breaker for us as we were planning for around a one-year world trip and wanted the flexibility of at least changing the dates, even if not the destination or the route.  

Also, one can only make a reservation using a form (how old school!) where exact the flight numbers, destinations and dates must be filled out and then mailed to them. 

RTW ticket guidelines 

Although the RTW tickets are cheaper and pretty flexible, they do come with certain guidelines that have to be followed: 

• Duration of travel: There is typically a minimum duration of the trip – I’ve seen ranging from 3 days to 10 days, and a maximum duration of the trip (typically one year). 
• Ocean crossings: to make the trip truly a ‘round the world’ you must cross the Atlantic Ocean once and the Pacific Ocean once. 
• Direction of travel: Typically you have to choose one direction of travel around the globe – either east or west. Means once you decide to go from Asia to Europe, you have to continue in the same direction. We chose east to west flying from Asia to Europe then North America, Australia and finally back to Asia. However there is some flexibility to backtrack within a region. For example, within Asia we go from east to west (Singapore to Delhi) and then west to east (Delhi to Bangkok). 
• Number of stopovers: You will have to do minimum of 2-3 stopovers and can do a maximum of 10-15 stopovers. This depends on the airline alliance and the class of travel 
• Connections: You can’t connect through the city you started in. Though you can connect from the other stopovers, you can’t stopover again more than 24 hrs in the same city 

This all may sound complex but good news is the alliance sites help you navigate through this with their interactive site and helps not only build the price but keep the travel itinerary within the guidelines            

I’m sold! How do I buy the ticket? 

Great! You can buy the RTW ticket via 

–       Travel agency: you will need to find an agency that specializes in world trips and have exclusive access to airline deals. They can help you build an itinerary but would require multiple sittings / calls with the travel agency office 

–       Travel portals: I’ve found that most big travel portals like Kayak, Skyscanner, Expedia, Booking etc aren’t really equipped for RTW tickets. Basically, they show multiple one-way tickets under their ‘Multi-City’ option with mostly limiting to maximum of 6-8 stopovers. The site that I found most user-friendly was Airteks (https://airtreks.com/). They have a simple interface to build the RTW travel and based on what I read on the net, seem to have quite a lot of experience in such itineraries.   

–       From the airline: (mostly via their call centers as most of the airline sites aren’t that user friendly for RTW ticket purchases) 

–       or the airline alliances.  We can no experiences with a travel agent as we’ve never really used one (the planning itself is so much fun! Why outsource that?!).

We bought our RTW tickets from the Star Alliance site as Singapore Airlines (where we are the frequent flyers of) is part of Star Alliance. However, we did explore different airline alliance options. Here are some of our observations:  

1. Star Alliance

This is the largest airline alliance so gives you access to pretty much every dream destination in the world. One is able to do upto 16 flights on the RTW ticket and travel up to 39,000 miles over 365 days (our journey is of 33,283 miles with 11 flights). They have a very intuitive and intelligent booking tool that lets you explore different flight options while staying within their travel guidelines. 

The site also has many cool theme-based itineraries. We looked a quite a few for inspiration but custom-built our own dream round-the-world ticket. 

2. SkyTeam

SkyTeam the world’s second largest airline alliance and has airlines from different continents in the mix. So, it is possible to travel to all continents. Unfortunately, they seem to have suspended round the world tickets when we checked 

3. OneWorld

The alliance covers all the continents with British Airways, AA, Quantas, JAL and Finnair in the mix. OneWorld offers different kinds of RTW tickets: 

• Continent-Based airfare: An intercontinental and multi-city round the world journey. Price increases by the number of continents you add to the itinerary.  
• Distance-Based airfare: Like the Star Alliance model, price is based on the distance travelled. It also provides an access to code-share airlines (including Jetstar, Air Tahiti etc) to match the number of destinations that Star Alliance offers    
• Circle Pacific: Travel excluding Middle East, Europe, Africa and SouthEast Asia 

Their site is relatively simple and easy but no comparison to the Star Alliance robustness of features