Through the end of December, you can choose from an itinerary covering some of Asia’s biggest cities for less than $1600, a jaunt through the highlights of the South Pacific for just over $2000, or a swing through two Asian cities and two European cities for under $1750. Yes, these are definitely tickets you’ll want to check out. Because as you probably know, simple round-trip flights to Europe and Asia alone often cost as much as the tickets listed here!

Here are the December RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through December 31, 2008.

• San Francisco - Hong Kong - Bangkok - Bombay / Mumbai - Bangalore - Singapore - San Francisco from US$1599 (plus taxes)
• New York - Singapore - Bangkok - Rome - London - New York from US$1749 (plus taxes)
• Los Angeles - Nadi (Fiji) - Auckland - Sydney - Bali (Denpasar) - Hong Kong - Los Angeles from US$2099 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

There is always a sacrifice

I’m always seeing people posting a planned itinerary on a message board, most notably BootsnAll’s busy and helpful forums. Usually someone new to traveling will list 8 countries or so that they want to visit in 2 months, and then several people will chime in that this pace is far too ambitious, and they should really only stick to 2 or 3 countries at most in 60 days. Well, if your funds and available time were both unlimited, then this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. It’s partly based on that you can spend 2 months in 2 countries, and then return 3 more times to spend 2 more months in each of the 6 other countries you’ll skip this time.

Obviously this is not realistic for many of us. Even those of us who make traveling a major time priority for a large chunk of our adult life, can’t afford to go on 2-month trips every year or two. And even if you were that lucky, you are still seeing the world at a very slow pace this way. If you were somehow able to do 10 such trips in 10 years, you’d still only have seen about 10% of the 200-or-so countries on earth. Something has got to give.

Advantages to traveling fast

• You’ll end up seeing way more in a shorter time. This is obvious, but somehow seems to escape some of the slow-traveling crowd.
• You’ll be able to see a much higher percentage of A-list attractions. Would you rather spend an hour in the 8th most famous cathedral in Prague, or the most famous cathedral in Krakow, and Copenhagen, and Hamburg etc?

Disadvantages to traveling fast

• It’s true that you can never get as deep an appreciation for a city in a day as you could in a week or two.
• You spend a higher percentage of your funds traveling if you spend more time going from place to place.
• You’ll likely get dizzy and confused from moving around quickly. This isn’t a joke. Changing cities and hotel/hostel rooms every day or two will soon make you unsure just where you are when you wake up in the middle of the night. And the sights, sounds, and smells come rushing by you so quickly it can be impossible to process them in real time, and this will catch up with you, at least temporarily.
• Making real travel friends is much more challenging when you’ll never see anyone for more than one day.
• You’ll miss much of the subtlety in each destination.
• It becomes nearly impossible to take a “day off” from traveling. This isn’t much of an issue on, say, a 3-week or less trip, but for any longer than that you’ll certainly want to just relax for a day or two here and there. Rushing from city center to airport or train station and back to a city center takes its toll. If your schedule only allows 2 days in each city, then you feel compelled to see things all day every day.

The points above are only some aspects of each side of the argument. It’s really different for every person and for every trip, and you’ll notice that even though I’m generally an advocate for traveling fast if you feel like it, you’ll notice the list of disadvantages is much longer. I find that when I get home I still have crystal clear memories of nearly every hour of my trip, and even though I get worn out at times, it can still be worth it.

Decide your own pace, and if you can stay flexible about it most of the way, that’s even better. On my RTW trip I stopped for a week in Rio and a week on a Greek island, and in each case I rented an apartment and didn’t do much of anything. Being able to take breaks like that is helpful, but even if you can’t, don’t be intimidated into traveling at a pace someone else recommends just because that is their preference.

Why Saturday night only?

The key to this trick is to be in a city with many business travelers, and then be sure your accommodation search includes 3-star and above properties. You can sometimes get luxurious rooms at nice business hotels for about what you’d pay for a private room at a hostel nearby. If you are going from hostel dorm to hostel dorm, then this is a really worthwhile thing to try in order to get a bit of big-city luxury mixed in between those dorm beds.

As you probably know, the vast majority of business travel takes place for weekday meetings and so forth. Many business hotels are jammed on Sunday nights with people who’ve arrived the night before a Monday meeting, and some of them are still fairly full on Friday nights of travelers whose schedule didn’t allow them to get out before Saturday morning. But obviously Saturday night is the total dead-zone, and even in cities with good nightlife and weekend visitors, you can sometimes find these deals for Saturday nights only.

My great recent example

I just got back from a 5-week research trip that took me through 9 countries in Europe. I stayed mostly in private rooms in hostels, and they averaged about €60 per night. The hostel in Dublin that I had stayed in a few days earlier was fully booked, so I went to kayak.com to see what else was available, not really thinking I’d be able to afford anything nice at all.

One of the cheapest listings for Dublin that night also said it was a 4-star self-catering hotel. It was €55 for that night, so I was more than a little suspicious, but it turned out to be a hotel that usually is full of business travelers who stay all week, and on Saturday nights their rooms are empty unless they can find some bargain hunters like me to fill them.

It turned out the location was a bit farther out than the map led me to believe, but it was still only about 4 short blocks past St. Stephen’s Green, so it was quite central. When I was shown my room I almost fainted. This was basically a large studio apartment with a small kitchen, a sofa, and a flat-screen TV. It was easily one of the nicest rooms I’ve ever paid for myself, and it was so nice that I got in early that evening so I could cook myself a pasta dinner and sip wine in my spacious living room. The tiny room at the hostel was €60 and sold out, and that was one of the luckiest things to happen to me in ages.

(The photo on top of this page is just of the living room part of the room, but there was also a small kitchen and an elevated sleeping area with a huge bed.)

Finding these specials

You can search kayak.com or ratestogo.com, as well as many other sites, and if they are available they’ll be mixed right in among the budget places. If you are searching for a Saturday night only, then pay attention to location (to make sure you are not out by the airport), but don’t be surprised if you find a really nice room for next to nothing.

Most people find a new ability to accept other people, cultures, and traditions, and also tolerate those they might not agree with. This has nothing to do with political philosophy, and everything to do with actual experience seeing amazing things first hand, and comparing and contrasting them to things you’ve seen before. Part of the fun is discovering these subtle aspects on your own as you go, but for a quick preview, below are 8 of the less obvious reasons why RTW travel is so wonderful.

1 - Break every routine you have

This is something most people are familiar with to a smaller degree from shorter trips, but when your entire life shifts to long-term travel it becomes much more significant. Put simply, most of us have routines that make each day, or at least each weekday, remarkably similar. We wake up around the same time, get coffee, have breakfast, go to work, and so on, and most of this is performed in a zombie-like state because each day is nearly identical. When you go on a 2-week trip you’ll break all these routines for those two weeks, but it’s hard not to fall right back into them when you get home.

But when you begin a life of long-term travel those old routines are right out the window, and when you finally call someplace “home” again, it’ll be hard to even remember what those nearly-identical days used to consist of. You’ll be forced to reexamine your schedule, what you eat and when, how you entertain yourself, who you keep in contact with, and pretty much everything else about your life. It can be very refreshing (and quite disorienting) to hit the reset button and invite only those things back into your life that you really want.

2 - Lose your desire for materialism

People who are preparing to embark on long-term travel are often forced to liquidate many of their possessions before they go out of necessity, but even those who aren’t will likely take on a new relationship with the material world. There is something about living out of a backpack for months or years on end, that tends to make people wonder how valuable their DVD collection or 10+ pairs of formal shoes really are. It doesn’t happen to every long-term traveler, but it seems that quite a few who survive with but 10 kilograms of possessions for an extended period will change their ways upon return to society at large.

Especially if you’ve gotten rid of most of your stuff before you left, you’ll think twice about nearly every new purchase when you get home, and this will likely save you quite a bit of money, though you’ll probably just use the extra dosh toward more travel anyway, so it’s not like you’ll get rich as a result. When you live out of a backpack for a long time you realize that you need amazingly few things on a daily basis, and each new thing that you might add to this begins to just feel like extra cargo that you’ll have to sell, give away, throw away, or store again one day.

3 - Discover things you’ll prefer forever

Most of us are creatures of habit, and much of what we prefer comes from the fact that our choices have been quite limited our whole lives. We prefer our national sport because it’s the one that’s on TV every weekend. We prefer the music performed by artists played on the radio where we live, or who play at our local clubs. We like our pizza the way the best place in our neighborhood prepares it. And so on.

Once you go around the world you’ll be assaulted with so many new options that your head will spin. Relating to a couple other topics on this list, it might surprise you how few new things you learn to love while you travel, but there will definitely be some new changes in your tastes that you will carry with you a long time into the future. When trying to watch at home, a Bollywood movie might seem ridiculous, but after you’ve been to India and especially after you’ve been to a cinema there, you might become a big fan. You might find that cold cuts and bread or just a croissant for breakfast is nicer than the cold cereal, or nothing, that you’ve been in the habit of having before.

4 - Reinvent yourself on your departure day

This might sound quite twisted on the surface, but it isn’t really so unusual, and it can be really revolutionary for some of us. You might be extremely shy and introverted when you are at home, and possibly not too happy about it. Or you might ponder if you insist on being the center of attention a bit too often in your regular life. Well, the moment you depart you can try to make positive changes in your behaviors, and you won’t feel self-conscious in doing so.

Even without thinking about it, many people find they have a different personality while traveling anyway. Being adventurous and outgoing is much easier if you suspect you’ll probably never see any of these people again in your life. You can concentrate on listening more than speaking, or practice approaching strangers, or whatever it is you might feel is your social weakness while in your normal bubble. After several straight months of this you might be able to have some of these new changes stick, and at the very least you’ll definitely have hundreds of new and interesting stories to break the ice with for the rest of your life.

5 - Make new friends and maybe find a new home

Some people set out on their round the world trip with the goal of possibly finding a new part of the world to call home, but for other people this can happen completely by accident. The number one cause for these relocations seems to be finding a new partner in one of your destinations, or perhaps as a fellow traveler passing through, but there are other people who visit some random area on their trip and then stay for years, or return home first only to do the move right and permanently later.

And it’s hard not to make at least a few friends while on the road. It seems that for most people it’s fellow backpackers who they bond with into the future, though making friends with locals is quite common as well. With e-mail and cheap or free Skype calls, it’s now very easy to keep up these friendships when you return home. It’s a pretty cool feeling to hear someone mention Peru or New Caledonia in a conversation, and be able to say, “Oh, I have friends there!”

6 - Reinforce your existing worldview

It must occasionally happen that someone leaves on a long trip as a conservative and comes home as a liberal (and maybe even the other way around), but it seems that far more often people will find countless examples as they travel of why they were right in the first place. If you are the type who feels that “social justice” is lacking at home, you’ll probably be horrified at some of the examples you see that are far worse as you travel.

On the other hand, if you feel that more free market reforms or a greater degree of morality are the answer, then you’ll also find unlimited examples to illustrate your theories as you move from place to place. Those who oppose your views to begin with might fantasize that you’ll come home agreeing with them, but much more likely is you’ll now have more ammunition for future debates than you ever imagined.

7 - Reexamine your own culture and habits

This is definitely related to one or more of the items above, but it’s a complicated and dramatic process, so it’s worth its own item. As mentioned above, much of our behavior is a direct result of our environment rather than from individual choices in each thing we do. Rules and attitudes about things like drinking, sex, how much skin we show in public, shopping on Sundays, religious ceremonies, and many more things are very different all around the world. Our first reaction might be to think the people in this foreign country are too traditional, or not traditional enough, but those who give it any more thought than that will really see that there is no right answer.

For example, adult men wearing short pants is actually only acceptable in certain pockets of the world, regardless of the temperature outside. You can’t help but wonder when you notice things like this. Is it an open and shut case that the 10% or so of people who find this acceptable are right, and the 90% who shun it are wrong? If you travel with an open mind, then questions like these will come up often along the way. Some things that seem so obvious at home are anything but obvious on the road, which makes RTW travel even more thought provoking than you might have guessed before you left.

8 - Appreciate your home upon return

No matter where you live and no matter how boring or uninspiring it might seem before you leave, you will discover things about it that you really appreciate once you’ve been away from it for a long time. If you live in a small town where everyone knows each other it might seem like a real drag, but once you spend weeks and months shuttling between big cities where no one knows their neighbor, and no one knows you, it’s very likely that you’ll finally discover the charm of small town life. Or if you live in a big city and you are longing for the wide-open spaces of new destinations, you’ll slowly begin to forgive the madness of city life when you realize that it also comes along with the ability to get nearly anything at just about any hour of the day.

Those above are just two extreme examples, but it will work for anyone in between as well. If you live in a place where people like us can save up enough money to go traveling for long stretches, then you live in one of the nicest places in the world and it’s got a lot going for it. Seeing your friends and family again will likely be something you’ll really look forward to after such a long time on the road, but also seeing movies at the theater you know, a few drinks at your favorite bar, or your favorite meal that isn’t available in most of the rest of the world. It’s different for everyone, but if you are like most of us you will come home with an appreciation for your home that you probably didn’t have when you left.

Bon voyage.

To tempt you even more, right now there are a few excellent prices available through BootsnAll on low season RTW fares. For starters, the best offer on the special November deals list is under $1750 for a tour of the highlights of South America - that’s just an amazing deal, especially considering that you might pay that much for a round-trip ticket to Europe during the high season. And the third deal on offer this month is just $2499 and includes stops in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Check them all out, they’re quite something.

Here are the October RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through October 31, 2008.

• Miami - Rio de Janeiro - Buenos Aires - Santiago - Lima - Cusco - Quito - San Jose - Guatemala City - Miami from US$1749 (plus taxes)
• Chicago - Tokyo - Bangkok - surface - Kuala Lumpur - Delhi - Vienna - surface - Paris - Chicago from US$1999 (plus taxes)
• Los Angeles - London - Paris - Cape Town - surface - Johannesburg - Hong Kong - Beijing - Los Angeles from US$2499 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

When a Eurail Pass is worthwhile

Before I discuss the benefits I am referring to, it’s worth noting that for many people the choice one way or the other will be obvious. Generally speaking, if you will be traveling mostly in the northern half of Europe, and especially if you are planning on some long journeys, then the Eurail Pass can be a great bargain anyway. Conversely, if you’ll be spending much of your time in Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, then it’s almost certainly best to go point-to-point once you get there.

The luxuries of having a Eurail Pass

I was blasting through Belgium, Germany, and France for a couple weeks there, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to figure out that I wanted to take, say, the 9:30 train somewhere, and know that I could enter the station at 9:20 and still have time to buy a coffee on the way to my seat. And if I wanted to take the 8:30 or the 10:30 train I could do so without worry.

Without a pass I’d have to show up at least half an hour before a train to be sure I got a ticket in time. That process usually only takes a few minutes, but just when you assume the lines will be short, you’ll almost certainly be faced with serpentine lines and/or most of the ticket sellers on a break at the same time. Buying individual tickets can be stressful and confusing even when things go right, so being able to just jump on any train without a ticket is an awesome luxury that is worth something.

Another thing that can make Eurail Passes worth more than you think is you can combine day trips with our longer journeys to save even more. It seems the Flexi-pass option (which gives you a number of travel days within 30 or 60 days) is the more popular way to go these days, and you can get the most out of these days by being creative.

Let’s say you take the train from Amsterdam to Berlin one day, arriving in Berlin at 2pm. You can put your bags away, and then jump right on another train to Potsdam or even Dresden or Leipzig, returning that same evening. Using this trick you not only save the train fare on the short journey, but you also save all the time standing in lines for each ticket. So you might save an extra €30 or more this way on that day, and have complete freedom with no lines to stand in as well. Think about this when calculating the total cost, because it makes the passes an even better bargain.

In most cases there is little point in really trying to master the local language on any kind of serious level, at least if you are only passing through for a couple weeks at the most. You’ll find that most people you’ll encounter will speak English, and as soon as they detect your accent (which they will do immediately, always), they will switch the conversation over into your language, partly as a convenience for you, and partly to speed things up for themselves. This is quite a luxury for us, but it’s still no excuse for us to not try at least a bit of the local tongue.

I admit I’ve been pretty bad about this myself, and I’m making a real effort to change my ways. One of my former worries was always that if I was somehow able to make my question understood to a local, that I would almost never understand the answer in the same language anyway. Again, in reality this is not a problem, since they’ll immediately identify your struggle with their language, and will answer back either in English, or in basic words and hand signals.

The other worry I’ve had, and this one is more realistic, is that I don’t want to sound foolish to the locals, especially if they speak my language fluently in addition to their own. But traveling around recently has made me realize how silly this is, and helped put it in perspective. Imagine the following example, and try to keep it in mind if you are hesitant to try the local tongue on your journey…

Imagine that you are dining in a restaurant in your home town, and two nearby tables are occupied by groups of foreign tourists. At one table you overhear someone ordering in a thick accent, and they say, “I am like to trying the clam chowder.” Sure, this sentence combined with a heavy accent might bring a smile to your face, but you have to give them credit for trying. Then at the next table you see the group trying to order, and they are only speaking to themselves in their own language, and pointing at the menu, hoping to be understood without ever trying any English. Which group seems more foolish in this case? The first group might have butchered our language, but the second group wouldn’t even try, and this is, unfortunately, how so many of us English speakers appear while traveling.

It’s a traveling cliché, but it’s true and worth remembering that simply trying a local phrase or two goes a long way with your guests, and in almost every case you’ll get your answer back in English anyway. The list of common phrases that is included in most guide books is enough, and at the very least you should learn hello, goodbye, thank you, and how much does this cost, and these simple words and phrases will put you ahead of the game when traveling.

This is probably most notable in continental European hostels, but it can also happen in North America, Australia, or parts of Asia as well. Simply put, the traveling style where people go from hostel to hostel can lead to an insular world where you spend nearly all your time with other backpackers (often the same people going in the same direction as you), and almost no time actually interacting with the locals you supposedly came to visit in the first place.

One reason this happens commonly is it’s far easier to keep joining in the tours, parties, and pub crawls offered at the hostel, and if you pass them up it can feel like you will be missing something. But if you don’t forge out on your own at least for a while in each city then you’ll likely regret it after you’ve come home again. People might ask you how you liked Prague, and you’ll be able to tell them about the Aussie girls at the hostel, and the drunken Brits you befriended on the hostel pub crawl, but you might not have any stories about meeting locals or going to off-the-beaten-track restaurants or neighborhoods.

In most hostels you’ll hear English spoken nearly all the time, including by the local workers. It’s very tempting to spend your evenings at the friendly hostel bar, but in a way this is almost like visiting another country and then spending your whole stay in your country’s embassy there. Put another way, visiting a new and foreign city is a bit like going deep into the sea with all its strange new creatures and completely different rules of gravity and behavior. If you visit and don’t spend all your time with the hostel crowd it’s like being in a wetsuit, where you actually can see and touch things up close. But visiting inside the hostel bubble is like going diving in a submarine, where you are always comfortable and things are easy, but you never get to touch the creatures you’ve come to see.

The important thing is to strike a balance. Traveling on your own can be hard, lonely, and very frustrating at times, but it can also be very rewarding when you find a secret little place where no one spoke English yet you were able to have fun anyway. The parties on the hostel circuit are a huge part of the fun of long-term travel, but sometimes you just have to say no and invent your own fun for a while.

With that in mind, we want to make sure you don’t freak out when you see the price on the 3rd RTW ticket deal listed here. It’s a bigger number than we usually see on these RTW deals, but before you hyperventilate, just check out the itinerary you’re getting for that money. It’s an amazing list of cities, and with 16 flights it works out to less than $290 for each ticket. Yeah, we think that’s pretty incredible, too.

Don’t stop dreaming, folks.

Here are the October RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through October 31, 2008.

• San Francisco - Hong Kong - Bangkok - Bombay (Mumbai) - Bangalore - Singapore - San Francisco from US$1599 (plus taxes)
• New York - Rio de Janeiro - Sao Paulo - Johannesburg - Nairobi - Dakar - New York from US$2899 (plus taxes)
• Miami - Buenos Aires - Rio de Janeiro - Lisbon - Dakar - Overland On Your Own - Bamako - Casablanca - Istanbul - Bahrain - Delhi - Kathmandu - Bangkok - Angkor Wat (Siem Reap) - Vientiane - Hanoi - Hong Kong - San Francisco - Miami from US$4599 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

What are city passes?

These are fairly new on the tourism scene, and I’m not sure who came up with this idea first, but at this point I’ve noticed that nearly every major city on the planet has its own variation. Basically, for one price you get free admission to a long list of that city’s best and most famous attractions, and usually you get free transportation thrown in for good measure. They are almost all sold in a 24-hour, 48-hour, and 72-hour version, with the per-day price getting more reasonable the longer you go, but of course the total price keeps going up.

Some research is very worthwhile

Just do a google search for “(city name) city pass” and you are sure to find it on top of the results, even if they’ve used a slightly different name for the thing. Just having a quick look at the prices for the cards is a good way to judge how expensive the attractions are in that city, but it’s also very important to see what’s included because in some cases you could be disappointed.

For example, I’m about to go to London, and I wouldn’t mind trying the London Eye thing, but it’s not included with the London Pass. And since most of the museums there are already free, there just isn’t enough left to make it worthwhile to me. In Amsterdam (where it’s called the iAmsterdam Card), the Anne Frank House isn’t included, though nearly everything else you might want to see is on there.

New York City has an unusual one, as the New York City Pass actually goes for a whole week instead of just a few days. It also includes most of the most important sites at a very reasonable price, so I’d recommend that one to anyone on their first trip there.

Strategies for using the city pass

For most of these city passes there is a 24-hour option, which sometimes means one calendar day, but other times actually means 24 hours. If you find one that will work from, say, 2pm one day until 2pm the following day, then they can be ideal since you can obviously hit a couple places late one day and a few more the following morning, which helps avoid attraction fatigue.

Even if they are good for only one actual day they are sometimes very worthwhile as they allow you to do one attraction blitz and get all your checklist attractions out of the way, so you have time for whatever else sounds good the remaining days in town. These things often let you skip ticket lines as well, so seeing perhaps 3 museums and one other type of attraction in one day is quite possible, and you’ll get free transportation all day to make it just that much easier.