So, what's the deal here. Is it a once-in-a-lifetime thing for most people, or do folks use it for mileage/status runs or what?[/QUOTE]
I'd always had a fairly romanticised notion of a RTW trip until I started reading FT
"Flying around the world" is a pretty cool concept, conjuring up images of untold exotic delights.
I think it all depends on how you approach travelling:
1. I miss home.
2. You can hop from one hotel to the next, walk down a street downtown or two, and hit up the "fantastic little flower market" in your Acapulburgkistan guidebook.
3. You can also do a tour of one continent (or even one country-- maybe by rail? *gasp*) and get a closer look at one particular place. Maybe there are small regional variations you'd like to notice, and in doing so you'd see that people are people, and just because they're 10,000 miles apart doesn't make them aliens, nor does standing next to each other make them indistinguishable.
My ideal RTW trip would be to travel as #3, but doing that at each place I visited, so as to be able to adjust to each place and get in the groove of the food and the life. Doing that, however, would take many many months or years. After a long or grueling enough trip, though, most people's approach to travel becomes "This is nice, but I'm ready for my own bed again", or as someone already mentioned: "better too short a trip than too long".
However, most of my travel seems to be short-ish trips dependent on where work sends me and where my friends are living, and it's pretty darn hard to do anything other than along the lines of #2. Different people have different ways of approaching short stays, but that's not relevant. Just don't pretend that 2 days gives you any sort of Deep Insight
My actual RTW wound up being determined by living in Europe and having a friend living in India, 5000 miles east of me, and another friend getting married in my hometown 5000 miles west of me. Airfare was simply cheaper if I combined the trips and just flew eastwards (on *A, in coach!).
I spent nearly two weeks visiting my friend in India, a 2-day stopover on the US west coast visiting another friend, 10 days in my hometown, a week on the US east coast visiting yet more friends, and flew home.
Total cost for hotels: 0 ^
Time: 5 weeks
Countries visited outside the US: 1
The miles/status is nice (that was the first time I made low-level elite), but I would happily do another short-ish RTW to see other far-flung friends...