G'day,

I've been trying to research my own round the world trip and noticed someone else had posted his plan in this section. I hope this is the right place to post! Maybe lonelyplanet forums would be better?

The plan was to make my way from Australia through China, India, Nepal, Bahrain, Egypt, UK, then use a working holiday visa to work there and maybe travel around Europe. Finally travel to the US, visit Canada, go down to Panama, then I was looking at a South American tour that goes through Lima to Brazil. Finally I would travel back to Australia.

The problem is that I sat down with a travel agent to plot a course with a Oneworld ticket and it seems I'm doing a bit of backtracking. I'm just wondering if Oneworld is even the best option or if I should consider one of the other round the world tickets. Right now they have me down for a ONE5 economy ticket. I really like the fact that I can change the times later on although the travel agent recommended that I lock in the early travel dates since it'll be hard to change during the busy season.

the itinerary:

(initially spend 2-3 months around asia, middle east)

starting mid November 2007:

Perth Australia - Hong Kong (Cathay)
Hong Kong - Beijing (Cathay)
Beijing - Hong Kong (Cathay)
Hong Kong - Delhi (Cathay)
Delhi - Amman (Royal Jordanian)

(perhaps get a train or something to Nepal)

Amman - Bahrain (Royal Jordanian)
Bahrain - Amman (Royal Joranian)
Amman - Cairo (Royal Jordanian)
Cairo - London (British Airways)

(spend 6-7 months in London, working and travelling around Europe, using rail and local flights)

London - New York (British Airways)

(spend about 2-3 months travelling around US, visit family in Canada and friends in Seattle at the minimum)

New York - Miami (American Airlines)
Miami - Panama (American Airlines)
Panama - Miami (American Airlines)
Miami - Lima (American Airlines)

(South American Tour)

Rio de Janeiro - Santiago (Lan Chile)
Santiago - Sydney (Lan Chile)

There just seems to be a lot of backtracking to Miami, Hong Kong, or Amman. Is it possible to get more direct flights you think? I will probably have to spend about $4900 on getting this round the world flight so I didn't want to waste my money in the early planning stages.

- Nick

You have 16 flight segments and 1 surface segment. You can add 3 more flights to your 20 segment limit. As for back tracking, most of the airlines operate hub and spoke networks, so you do back track instead of more direct 1 plane service. At least with the segment based ONE's you don't need to be concerned about that fact.
What cities in the US do you plan to visit? You mention Seattle. Perhaps fly London-Seattle, then use some of your flights to go to Canada and other US cities before going to Panama via Miami.

G'day Nick. Welcome to FT. Look like you will miss Oz Fest 5 in Hobart (23-25 May 08)

You can back track as much as you like in continents. Your trip looks like doing the shortest flights. For example you can do LHR-LAX-JFK to get more frequent flyer miles. Direct flights are not always the best. Longer flights where you can sleep and flights with more civilised departure & arrival times are sometimes better choices

Flights in Eu can be very cheap. And Eu is very small compared to Oz (even compared to Tassie) . *ONE* tickets can get you to places that are very expensive or hard to get to. Would recommend Easter Island (SCL-IPC-SCL)

SCL-AKL/SYD is hard to get in L (economy LONE5), but you are permitted to do a transit in NA on the way back from South America to Oz. eg SCL-LAX-MEL

Put your itinerary in Mileage Monkey to check if its OK. MM is not always 100% but a very good starting point. Some flights are seasonable, so don't always work in MM

Nick

I did something similar last year. Your plans look pretty good.

As mentioned, backtracking is a bit unavoidable. I avoided a bit by using surface sectors, but you can't do this so much now.

I think your Europe flights look good as the areas you are using your LONE flights don't have so many cheap flights, so I think that is a good use of your 4 flights.

In the US, if you want to go to SEA, you could fly there from London, then across to the East coast, and then your other sectors. I assume you have a reason for going to Panama City? Not that it's bad, but there are lots of alternatives. You have another 3 flights you could use in Nth America, so worst comes to worst you could fly to Canada and back...

The SCL-SYD flight does get booked out, but since your trip looks like taking about a year you should be fine to book in advance. My trip was 360 days, arriving back in Oz on 23 Dec (busy time). You may not be able to book into a date 365+ days in advance, but you can open date, or pick an earlier date and change to the date you want when inventory opens up (about 330 days in advance). I just emailed our travel agent in late Jan (for a Dec flight) to remind them to change the date to the exact flight I wanted. It would be wise for you to pick a date and work around that, as changing dates closer to the time might be difficult...

If you really have no other flights to add, you can also add flights to/from Tassie (or Perth). Perth would be better value, Jetrats are pretty cheap...

Good luck

I was the guy asking for the other sanity check :-) it was quite useful. i decided to go back straight to the drawing board with a much simplified itinerary, as I was doing a lot of backtracking too (including over the land).

As suggested, Mileage Monkey (linked above) is a great place to start. I like in particular, the tool which shows you all ONE eligible flights out of a particular city. This can alternatively be done using the 'interactive map' on the Oneworld.com site. I find that both of these, in combination with the downloadable oneworld planner, are quite useful, and might help you avoid backtracking situations.

For example, you could do things such as, on the way back from Beijing stop in Singapore/Bangkok rather than HKG again. I think it's possible to get DEL flights from there. Or atleast till Mumbai, and then look at internal LCCs in India.

Another recommendation is that you can use a lot more land sectors, for example in the hong kong-beijing thing is not hard by train. A tough option is to do Panama to Lima overland, but folks have concerns about crossing Columbia by land.

In south america, I'd recommend SCL-IPC-SCL too.

Mwenenzi, your post has a lot of good advice, but I'm not sure recommending LHR-LAX-JFK or "longer flights where you can sleep" is necessarily a good idea for someone travelling Economy.

(I've done LHR-LAX-IAD, but that was in F.)

Preach it, brother. Especially when you're not even getting many miles from the extra agony.