Planning our Around-the-World Trip
Taking an around-the-world trip is exciting to think about and equally as exciting to plan. At heart, I am a planner and an organizer; tackling this six-week trip really jazzed me up.
How we Decided on this Trip
The idea of an around the world has been on our bucket list for a few years and the timing presented itself the summer of 2024 as we were searching for flights to New Zealand after the logistics of another planned trip weren’t working out. We were unable to find flights that worked for us utilizing miles and the cost without miles seemed unreasonable for the number of layovers and overall flight time. Plus, it was a significant investment so I decided to look at other options and come back to Graeme with some solutions.
The Research
I remembered that OneWorld and ANA (Star Alliance) were two options for around the world tickets and decided to look at both. There are a handful of other ways to do it but these two made the most sense for us when considering the miles that we had and the effort I was willing to expend.
In the beginning, I decided to explore the ANA Star Alliance and honestly, it was overwhelming. And while I had enough miles to do it, I didn’t want to. The tool wasn’t intuitive for me and after throwing a couple of hours at it I caved and gave up. I have since spent more time playing around with it and I think I’ll try to utilize it for a shorter trip.
Next, I decided to look at the OneWorld RTW flight planner. This one was a little more user friendly, at least for me. I played with it for a few days and was confident that I could design a trip that would check a lot of boxes for us.
Choosing OneWorld
Finally, after playing with routing, cities, countries, and time frames, I settled on OneWorld. There are three options to circumnavigate the globe with OneWorld: continent based fares, distance based fares, and intercontinental fares in the Pacific region. You can choose from first, business, or economy seating for these fares and you cannot use miles, it’s a cash purchase.
We chose the OneWorld Explorer option and here is a summary of the rules:
- Destinations are grouped into three zones and six continents.
- Generally speaking you travel from east to west, or west to east without reversing direction.
- You have from ten days to one year to complete travel and can stay as long as you like in any destination within that year.
- You start and end in the same city.
- You must cross the Atlantic and the Pacific.
- You can choose 3-6 continents and 3-16 flights.
Our trip was all three zones and four continents. Country selection was driven by adding places that were on our bucket list and maximizing our strategy of tackling demanding travel sooner rather than later.
The Booking Process
After getting a lot of the legwork out of the way it was time to bring Graeme in and get his input. It took a couple of days of playing with the booking tool to nail down an itinerary that worked for us. We decided early on that we would fly business class and we landed on New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Maldives, and Qatar and in that order.
This itinerary put us on Qantas and Malaysia Airlines, neither of which we had flown, and Qatar Airlines, which was our favorite airline. The QSuite is definitely as amazing as you hear that it is.
The next step was to get on the phone with OneWorld. The gentleman that we worked with was well-versed in booking these flights. He had some clarifying questions for us and explained some of the finer points of the fare. In turn, we had some questions for him about missed fights and in-country flights outside of the itinerary. It took us about an hour to get this part done including our seat assignments.
Graeme is an avid aviation guy and he had meticulously looked at the aircraft for each flight and chosen the best seats for us. This would never have been on my radar and I’m so glad that he took the time to do this for us.
The next step was to hold the flights while they were reviewed to make sure we had satisfied all of the rules and that the flights and seating preferences were available. This part of the process could take up to 48-hours but we had our email the next day along with instructions for next steps.
We reviewed everything one last time, then we called and paid for the tickets. That made it real!
Final Thoughts
To summarize, each of these destinations were places that we had ultimately hoped to visit and OneWorld made it very easy to get to them with a little homework and practice with their booking tool.
One thing I wish we had done differently was to add our flights from DFW to our starting point at JFK. It wouldn’t have made any difference in the fare and everything would have been on one booking. We opted to book that leg separately to try to game the unpredictable January weather in Texas so we didn’t miss the first leg. That would have been disastrous.
We would definitely consider buying another continent-based fare with OneWorld. It’ an easy way to see multiple countries at one price while making amazing memories.
