Round The World Tickets
The RTW ticket versus point-to-point debate, continued
This is well-trodden territory for many people, but I wanted to mention one aspect that some people fail to consider when deciding whether or not to buy one ticket ahead of time or separate tickets as you go. The point-to-point style is definitely the best choice for many people, but I’ve seen that some of the folks leaning toward that strategy either don’t realize all of what’s involved, or they don’t want to know because they’ve made up their mind anyway.
We live in an age that, with very few exceptions, no matter where you are there are many cheap flights to be found. And I’ve seen people who notice this phenomenon and then make the assumption that buying individual tickets around the world will be cheap and easy as long as their schedule remains flexible. It does work out that way in most places, but not everywhere, and those exceptions can be budget killers if you aren’t careful.
For example, if you are in, say, Kuala Lumpur and you want to fly Australia next you’ll go online and see plenty of cheap flights from KL to Singapore, Hong Kong, or even South Africa, but there may not be any cheap flights available to Sydney. So you have to either drastically alter your trip by flying through cities you didn’t intend to visit, or by cutting out places you did want to see. Your other option, of course, is to pay the unexpectedly high fare and carry on with your trip as planned. This is probably what most people will do, but suddenly your budget for flights just went up by US$500 that you weren’t expecting and you didn’t price in when comparing a single RTW ticket.
So the point of all of this is, if you decide to buy tickets as you go, and that’s definitely a fun and workable way of doing this trip, you have to compare apples to apples when doing the price comparisons. You should price the one big ticket and then get prices for each individual segment to compare it. This can be a bit tricky because some flights might be more or less expensive during the specific time of year you’ll actually be taking them, but you can get a good idea.
And back to Australia for another example of this, there is very little competition currently on flights between Oz and the US, so one-way fares are about the same price as round-trips bought in advance, and finding any flight for under US$1,000 is nearly impossible.
So check out your whole trip before you make that final decision. I’ve seen many instances where people who have yet to actually begin their RTW brag that buying individual tickets is cheaper, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who has completed their RTW say the same thing. Again, the total cost of tickets shouldn’t be the only factor to consider with this choice, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll be able to pick up US$99 flights anywhere you want to go if your timetable is flexible, because you won’t.
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