Posts Tagged ‘Featured’
Special February fares for RTW tickets
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009If looking at the news these days has you feeling low, you have two choices – you can stay glued to the television until there’s something good to report, or you can get out and make something good happen. We are, of course, advocating for the latter – and we think one of the best ways to create your own good news is by getting out and seeing the world.
Easily one of the best things about traveling right now is that there are exceptional deals available. Airlines and hotels (among other travel-related industries) are cutting prices in order to lure travelers back out of their economic-slump-induced hibernation, so if you can take time out for a trip right now you’ll be in for some amazing discounts. And that includes RTW tickets.
Here are the February RTW ticket deals – these prices are good through February 28, 2009.
- Los Angeles – Hong Kong – Bangkok – Singapore – Bali (Denpasar) – Los Angeles from US$1195 (plus taxes)
- Los Angeles – Sydney – Christchurch – Tongatapu (Tonga) – Nadi (Fiji) – Honolulu – San Francisco from US$1649 (plus taxes)
- New York – Beijing – Hong Kong – Singapore – Bangkok – Bombay / Mumbai – Nairobi – Cairo – Athens – Rome – Copenhagen – Berlin – London – New York from US$2999 (plus taxes)
These itineraries are just a sample to get your mind going – they might be just what you had in mind, but if they’re not exactly where you wanted to go that’s okay, too. You can plan your own customized RTW trip in seconds and visit just the cities you want.
Tags: Featured, rtw tickets
Posted in RTW Travel Deals | 2 Comments »
Itineraries for RTW trips – Leaving from North America
Friday, January 30th, 2009
When people get serious about the idea of going on a round the world trip, obviously one of the first issues involves putting together some kind of itinerary or route map. Sure, there are people who prefer to just buy their first one-way ticket, and make the rest up as they go, but if you really want to travel “around the world” it’s not a bad idea to have a general plan in mind early on, even if you end up winging it anyway.
As someone who’s done a long RTW in addition to dozens of other trips of various lengths, I’ve learned quite a bit about how these itineraries and RTW route maps tend to go, so I’ll be sharing some itinerary ideas along with commentary here over the next few months.
Leaving from North America
While it’s true that Australians probably travel more per capita than any of the rest of us, and Europeans aren’t far behind, Americans and Canadians still make up a huge percentage of the people doing this. So to begin with, I’ll share the route I ended up doing myself, and then I’ll branch into other starting points in the future.
(more…)
Tags: Featured
Posted in Featured, RTW Travel Deals | 10 Comments »
Plan some resort stops while on your RTW trip
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
When most people begin planning their beginning round the world trip itinerary, it’s common to concentrate on RTW must-see sights – things like the Great Pyramids of Giza or the Acropolis in Athens, but along the way you are going to want to take some breaks from those historical sights, and fortunately you’ll be able to find some really nice resorts that are surprisingly affordable.
Before you leave home on such a trip it might not occur to you that you’ll need a “vacation” from your vacation, but you will. If you plan this sort of thing in advance, and even pencil it into your original itinerary, you’ll be able to relax for long periods of time while spending minimal funds in the process.
Another reason to stop in resort areas
This part doesn’t occur to some people, but the common reason that folks go on a RTW trip is some form or another of they “want to see the world.” Well, sure, the world works as often as it has to, and people build museums and parks and whatnot, but the world also likes to take a bit of time off when it can. There isn’t much history involved with most resort areas, but they are still a big part of the culture everywhere they exist around the world.
(more…)
Tags: Featured, resorts
Posted in Featured, RTW Travel Deals | 1 Comment »
Special January fares for RTW tickets
Monday, January 12th, 2009Whether you’ve resolved to travel more this year or not (and what travelers among us don’t make that resolution pretty much every year?), chances are good that you’ll be at least poking around the web looking for a cheap plane ticket now and then – especially in this economy. But if all you’re looking for is cheap international airfare, we can help you out. In fact, with the deals you’ll find listed below, you may be tempted into making more than just a simple round-trip journey.
See, if you’ve priced out round-trip flights to just about anywhere lately, you’ll recognize that the prices on these multi-stop tickets are pretty incredible. I’ve paid more for a plain old round-trip ticket to Europe than these tickets cost, and with these tickets you’ll get several cities thrown in. So no matter what you think your travel plans will be this year, do yourself a favor and take a look at these tickets. You just might get inspired by one of the itineraries.
Here are the January RTW ticket deals – these prices are good through January 31, 2009.
- Los Angeles – Lima – Buenos Aires – Sao Paulo – Santiago – Los Angeles from US$1099 (plus taxes)
- San Francisco – London – Delhi – Singapore – San Francisco from US$1435 (plus taxes)
- New York – Hong Kong – Bangkok – Singapore – Bali (Denpasar) – Cape Town – New York from US$2399 (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.
Tags: Featured, rtw tickets
Posted in Featured, RTW Travel Deals | 1 Comment »
Using Skype for voice calls while traveling is easy and often free
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Only a few years ago, trying to make or receive phone calls while traveling was difficult and often very expensive. That can still be the case in many places without a good tourist infrastructure, but several recent developments have made it easy and cheap, even for quality that is amazingly good.
Skype is the best VoIP service
Forget bringing a mobile phone and dealing with sim cards, and also forget about those confusing calling cards that were necessary in most countries until recently. Sign up for a Skype account, and you’ve got a free and easy way to make calls anywhere you can get on the internet. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and Skype is the biggest and best of the competing services offering these calls.
(more…)
Tags: communication, Featured, skype
Posted in Featured, RTW Travel Deals | 3 Comments »
Free walking tours are an excellent new trend in Europe and Israel
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Started only in 2006, there is a new revolution spreading around Europe and elsewhere, and it’s especially helpful to RTW travelers and others on strict budgets. A company called Sandeman’s, which was founded by Chris Sandeman in Berlin, has begun offering “free” walking tours of various cites in a very novel way. As someone who has taken 5 of the tours already, I can highly recommend all of them.
A free walking tour?
Okay, so they aren’t exactly free, in that before the tour begins the guide will mention that the tours are really “tips-based” and not intended as some benevolent offer to tourists. You could literally pay nothing and walk away at the end, and some people do this on nearly every tour, but most people find the tours to be extremely interesting and fun, so a tip of perhaps €5 or £5 feels like a good deal, and enough that the guide feels appreciated. The guides will also usually point out the sterile tour buses making a similar route, and that those tourists are usually paying €20 or more for 90 minutes of prerecorded commentary. (more…)
Tags: Featured, pub crawls, tours, walking tours
Posted in Featured, RTW Travel Deals | 8 Comments »
8 Not-so-obvious reasons to go on a round the world trip
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008When most people consider the reasons for going on a round the world trip, the first and most obvious one is to “see the world.” This is a great and noble reason all by itself, but there is so much more to it than that. Long-term travel changes people, almost always for the better.
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. (more…)
Tags: Featured
Posted in Featured, RTW Travel Deals | 12 Comments »
11 places you should definitely try to see on a round the world trip
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008Our world is filled with must-see sights and attractions, and some of them are far easier to reach than others. Seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum in Rome is easy on nearly any casual swing through Europe, whether it’s early in your life or late. Sights like those are also surrounded by hundreds of other worthwhile things, so working them into your schedule is best left to a regional trip where you can give everything the attention that it deserves.
But the world is also home to a nearly infinite list of excellent sights and attractions that are harder to see without going to great lengths and tremendous expense. Some of them are set among other things that could help justify a special trip, but many of Earth’s greatest attractions are spread around the globe in places that aren’t conquered so easily.
Those planning a Round The Word (RTW) trip have a special advantage in their sightseeing future, since just a short jump can put them in one of these outstanding places that seem so remote otherwise. The list below could be 100 places long, and a huge part of the appeal of a RTW trip is having the ability to invent your own itinerary, so really, anything goes. Nevertheless, here are 11 places that many people find to be huge highlights of a RTW trip, and it’s also fairly easy to string many of these together on the average global tour.
1 – Iguazu Falls, Argentina/Brazil
It’s hard to classify the appeal of watching water rapidly changing elevation en mass, but for one reason or another nearly everyone who visits the Iguazu Falls finds it stunning and very worthwhile. Globally speaking, these falls are far more impressive than Niagara, and their only rival is Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and that one is far too out of the way for most RTW travelers. There are actually 270 separate falls spread over 2.7 kilometers of curving forest, so the number of unique views of the falls is almost endless. Iguazu is spread between Argentina and Brazil, with each side having a very impressive and different national park from which to take in the views, and there are speed boat rides through the falls, among other things, located down below, so spending most of a day at each park doesn’t get old as quickly as you might fear.
Travelers counting countries also get a bonus as the falls are where Paraguay meets Argentina and Brazil, and short forays into that landlocked country are possible during your visit. You can reach the Iguazu Falls area on long bus rides from anywhere in the region, and also on short and cheap flights from Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. Package deals including a flight, hotel, and tours of both parks are quite affordable. (more…)
Tags: Featured
Posted in Featured | 60 Comments »
