Round The World Tickets
Don’t make these mistakes when booking individual flights on your RTW trip
It’s very possible you’ve already dealt with the first of these issues, especially if you live in Europe, where low-cost airlines have exploded in popularity in the past years. But regardless of where you are flying from and to on your RTW trip, it’s very important to check out exactly which airports you’ll be using. Not paying close attention can mean a deal that looked good online might not actually be a good deal at all, and worse, you could easily miss a flight if you find out too late.
In case you haven’t dealt with this much already, it’s very handy to know that as air traffic has increased dramatically in the past years, and especially as the aforementioned low-cost airlines have popped up, you’ll be finding more and more of the cheapest flights are using an obscure airport on one side, and sometimes even on both ends. Many of these new airports are way outside the city they claim to serve, and this can cause major scheduling and transportation problems if you didn’t realize where you were going.
On my RTW trip this actually happened to me 3 different times, and fortunately none of those three incidents caused me much of a problem. When flying from Flores to Guatemala City I had researched my transportation options on how to get from the international airport to the lovely city of Antigua. But when I landed in Guatemala City I found myself at a tiny airport on the outskirts of the city. My transportation options turned out to be share a van with other people on my flight, or walk. Fortunately, sharing the van turned out to be a decent option, but if this would have happened elsewhere it could really have left me in a jam. If it turned out your outgoing flight was out of an airport other than the one you thought, you could obviously miss your plane and maybe be out a lot of money too.
Many months later the exact same thing happened to me flying into Kuala Lumpur and also Melbourne, Australia. In both cases I was blissfully unaware until I saw the airport outside the window as we were landing that I was about to be deposited in a part of a country I had no knowledge of. In the case of Kuala Lumpur I was only staying one night, and I took a taxi to the main airport in about 30 minutes, so it didn’t throw me off too badly.
In Melbourne it turned out I landed at the most remote of their several airports in the area, and the bus that took me into the city center cost around US$20 and took over an hour. This sort of thing is a potential problem if you are trying to find the best deals between cities because it’s very possible that I booked that flight because it was a bit cheaper than another one I found on a travel-booking site, but a flight into the main airport might have actually been wiser if the ground transportation cost less and took less time. Again, you can never be too careful when you are booking flights because most travel agents or websites won’t warn you that you are booking into a remote airport with expensive and limited transportation options.
Another thing to watch out for is much more basic, but still very important. Pay close attention to the time zones in each country you are flying to and from. My flight from Ko Samui, Thailand to Kuala Lumpur was almost due south, so it never occurred to me I’d lose an hour getting to Malaysia. I still didn’t realize it the next morning when I was heading to the airport for my flight to Sydney. Fortunately I was just early enough, because if not I would have missed my flight and it would have cost me probably US$100 and might have meant I’d have to check back into my hotel for another night. I was surprised by time zone changes 2 other times, so you might also be surprised by some of the odd places the clock changes on your trip.
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