Round The World Itineraries & Ideas
 

I justed ticketed my RTW trip. Here's the itinerary and a few reasons/lessons learned. Hopefully others will add their trips to provide a good repository.

For me, this is a honeymoon trip and I am limited to 4 weeks vacation for my travel time. Also, we elected to go East to West since both of us value our sleep and we do fine with longer days, but short days really kill our internal clocks.

And we went with 1st class tickets even though it only helps on a handful of segments. Honestly, it isn't worth it, but we wanted to be able to say we went first class the whole way on our honeymoon, so it is for "bragging rights" more than for any difference in service.

ITINERARY:

MCO (Home) - ATL - OGG (DL)

We start in Maui - after the wedding we'll spend several days just relaxing on the beach and recharging the batteries prior to the rest of the trip. Plus it breaks up the Pacific travel nicely.

HNL - NRT (NW)

Northwest has a direct flight so we elected to go with their business class instead of adding 7 hours to the flight in order to get 1st with KAL (8 vs 15 hours is a no brainer). We were also careful to book their 744 flight as those have the new seats while it appears the D10 does not. We booked a little Island Air flight from Kapalua to HNL separately. Tokyo was a late addition to the trip as we had one stop left we could use and I wouldn't mind seeing it.

NRT - ICN - PEK (KE)

We could have flown direct with NW, but there was a misconnect in Seoul going this way which gives us one night there. They were kind enough to book us on an early flight in from Tokyo so we get a "free" one-day stop-over just to add another country to the list. Then on to Beijing. It has a lot of history and is relatively close to the great wall. This is a stop I suspect will be very interesting.

PEK - ICN - BOM (KE)

We actually were planning to fly into DEL, but KAL doesn't go there. We would have had to connect through Paris on AF - which would have made it an incredibly long trip. In the end, Delta granted us a waiver that allowed us to fly into Mumbai and out of Delhi even though it is backtracking just a little bit and we booked a Jet Airways flight between the two separately. I was happy to pay for the extra ticket in order to avoid an entire extra day on an airplane, plus we get to see another city. It will be nice to visit Mumbai (Bombay) but the highlight of this stop is still the Taj Mahal in Agra (just up the road from New Delhi). I truly doubt I'll ever be on the far side of the globe again so this will be my only real opportunity to see India.

DEL - CDG - CAI (AF)

Cairo and the pyramids comes next. Paris on this leg is our only really bad connection of the entire trip with a 5 hour lay-over. There is a Sheraton in the airport though so we'll just get a room instead of trying to wait it out in the lounge.

CAI - MXP - NAP (AZ)

We then head to Naples. We spend a few days there then take a train to Venice, then another train to Nice before driving up through the wine country and into Paris. Being able to fly into one city and then out of another in the same area is great.

CDG - ATL - MCO (AF/DL)

And back home. It was the honeymoon that started in Hawaii, wrapped up in Paris, and did a trip around the world in between. And the scrap book will include photos of the great wall of china, the taj mahal, and the pyramids.


We seriously considered a stop in Australia or New Zealand but decided that we'll take a separate trip some time and spend a few weeks there instead of trying to cram in a few days on this trip. Kenya would have also been nice, but after China, India and Egypt we decided to instead go straight to the more relaxing environs of Europe. (If we had done it, it would have replaced Tokyo on the agenda).

Planning the trip was great. I called at the magic 331 day mark every fews days for a month and was able to get every flight on the exact day that I wanted it with Delta 1st to maui, international 1st class for 3 of the 4 planes where it was offered (missed on CDG - CAI) and business on the rest (except MXP-NAP which is a one cabin aircraft). Alitalia was the last leg to fall into place as they didn't load their schedule until roughly a month after the 331 day point.

For this trip, the taxes were $155 per ticket. Good Luck to any others planning a Round the World trip.

Congratulations. Did you have carriers/routes/destinations "mapped out" before each 331-day call, or did you work that out on the calls themselves? If you did it beforehand, was it with Delta's assistance, or did you do your own legwork, or some combination?


Thanks, this is very helpful.

I had a rough plan of the entire trip before I made the first phone call and then tweaked and refined it after I booked each segment. I downloaded the Skyteam Travel Timetable to see the flight options and I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone planning a RTW trip.

Congrats on getting married! ^
Four small notes:
1) AFAIK, backtracking is allowed within continents, so I can't see where the problem would have been for the BOM/DEL situation. Sounds more like a misinformed agent to me.
2) NAP-CDG isn't exactly a short commute by car. It's fine if you are planning to spend 6-7 days going it slow but IMHO a bad idea if you expect to drive all the way within 3 days.
3) If there wasn't a suitable connection on AF to CAI and you were anyway sacrificing first class, you could have changed planes in MXP, FCO or PRG to get a few extra miles (subject to MPM of course)
4) How can taxes for all this be $155??? Do they waive fuel surcharges? I pay significantly more than this for two of my usual BHX-PRG-SKG roundtrips!!!

Thanks graraps. We're both really excited. In response to your points...

1) With an award ticket, I didn't think you could backtrack at all with stop-over cities (obviously routing sometimes requires it, but that is different from the end-points) - at least that is what I was told on a few occasions. I could very well be wrong though as I just took their word for it. I didn't really worry about it though as it quickly became a non-issue for me. The India stopover was the only area where it arose at all and the "right answer" quickly became apparent to everyone, and they made it happen.

2) Sorry if I wasn't clear. We'll fly into Naples and spend a few days there before catching a night train into Venice. After a couple of days there, we take another train into Nice. We'll spend a night there and then pick up the car in Nice and drive to Paris across two days with a stop-over at a chalet in the wine country. It will still be a hearty drive, perhaps 6 hours per day, but driving through the French countryside is something my fiance really wants to do. If we make regular stops along the way, I don't think it will be too bad.

3) I looked at several options for DEL - CAI. AZ's connections were just as bad and KLM was even worse. OK doesn't fly into DEL so that wasn't an option. In the end, it was essentially a coin toss between AF and AZ and the Delta rep recommended AF as she said their commitment to India had been more consistent and there was slightly less risk going that way. That plus the Sheraton at CDG tipped the scales to what I ended up with.

4) I have no idea. I just paid the man what he asked for and it seemed quite reasonable to me. :cool: Earlier in the process I had asked what the taxes might amount to and was told they tended to range from $100 - $200 so obviously what I was charged is pretty much right in line with what anyone might expect on this type of award.

Don't try and understand the tax thing - our family of 6 is going to the US this summer - I decided to liquidate my BA account for 3 of the tickets (for all those that complained last year about LUT - BA only gives 25% of miles on discounted coach!). So the BA routing is TLV-LHR-LAX / SEA-JFK-TLV and the taxes BA charged were about $150 / ticket. At the time it seemed reasonable. Then the other three I booked TLV-PRG-JFK-CDG-TLV and paid $60 with Delta...