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Home » RTW Travel » Booking flights while on the road has gotten much easier, but there are some exceptions

Booking flights while on the road has gotten much easier, but there are some exceptions

If you are planning your RTW trip now you have some serious advantages that didn’t exist only a few years ago. Booking cheap airline tickets from any computer is now very easy, mostly due to physical tickets being phased out in favor of electronic tickets in most places. The old chore of having to track down a travel agency with employees you could communicate effectively with has mostly been replaced by fast and efficient online bookings, but there are a few exceptions.

The places you often can’t book online

If you haven’t done much ticket pricing for your trip yet you might be surprised to learn about this one major quirk in the system. Simply put, domestic airline tickets in 2nd and 3rd world countries often work just like train tickets. The same is usually true of flights between resort islands, even if those islands are in different countries. When I say they work like train tickets, I mean they usually have one fixed price for every seat on every flight, and you really don’t even have to buy them much in advance either. Of course you’ll want to stay on top of this, as demand definitely is much higher at certain times, but typically these things work out such that you just wait for the next flight and then off you go.

Take Guatemala, for example. The Tikal ruins are in the north of the country, and Antigua and Guatemala City are in the south. You can take a dodgy bus between the two if you time it right and don’t mind spending 10 hours on bumpy roads, but you can also book a flight between the two quite easily. The odd thing about it is you’ll go to a travel agent and they’ll say the flight is US$79 or whatever, and that’s the same price if you leave today as if you leave in 6 months. There are probably 15 flights a day on 3 different airlines, so often the locals will just show up at the airport and climb aboard the one that leaves next. If that one is full, you wait 45 minutes and get on the next one. The ticket they hand you might only be partially filled out as well, but this is normal and just the way things work there. This is true of flights between Canary Islands and flights in French Polynesia, and in many countries with domestic flights. You’ll want to figure these out in advance, but don’t be surprised if the whole ticketing process is very different from the usual when in these areas.

The best way to book flights online nearly everywhere else

In case you haven’t heard of it yet, Kayak.com (and its co-owned twin brother Sidestep.com) is a meta-search engine, and it actually works for almost every route around the world. Many Americans assume at least half your journey has to be involving an American airport, but they can search for flight deals between Barcelona and Athens just as well as between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The only other thing to be sure of before you buy your electronic ticket through Kayak (or rather through the airline or site they send you to) is that it checked all the budget airlines. In a few cases there are some carriers that don’t show up on the Kayak results, so you want to go to whichbudget.com, and in just a couple clicks you’ll know all the airlines that go between that city pair. In most cases you’ll see that Kayak searched all of them, but if you see a particular airline that didn’t make the search list you should check their flights on their own site before locking in whatever Kayak recommends.

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