Travel – Round the World

This post was triggered by a question posted by a frequent flyer. His question was if a flight from Heathrow Airport (London) to Haneda Airport (Tokyo) across central Asia, China, followed by return trip over the Pacific and Canada was a “round the world” trip,

What is "Round the World"?

An academic might define Round the World (RTW) as a circumnavigation of the world on a single itinerary. The path of a true (global) circumnavigation forms a continuous loop on the surface of Earth separating two regions of comparable area. But there would be major logistical difficulties is doing this.

Oddly, only 12% of backpackers include Europe in their RTW itinerary, and only 13% include Africa, but 100% include Asia.

How to plan a trip around the world, an article by National Geographic, does a great job in touching all the bases on the way to making a RTW trip. You can fly, take trains, hike, go by truck, cruise, sail, or even take a cargo ship. For me there were a couple of points worth remembering. I think the biggest question is to decided if it’s a “once in a lifetime” trip, and is it going to take 23 days or 292 days?

Often the same major transport hubs were mentioned, making it all the more important to include some lesser-known destinations, such a Vietnam, Cuba, Oman, or Taiwan.

Finally, I found valuable the mention of some key destinations, such as Easter Island’s Moai statues, Angkor’s jungle-flanked temple complexes, Victoria Falls and Zanzibar, Nova Scotia, St Helena, the Great Barrier Reef, Panama Canal, Machu Picchu, Giza Pyramids, rock-carved Petra and a Serengeti safari.

A Google search lists 1,000’s of pages providing advice on making a RTW trip, but most appear to repeat the same options and messages.

How to define a "Round the World" ticket?

Firstly there existed Round the World (RTW) air tickets, but the companies impose some important limitations on such tickets.

Star-Alliance offers a RTW, with the following conditions:-

Start and end in the same country
Follow one global direction (East or West)
Cross both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean
Have a minimum of 2 stops and maximum of 15 stops
Travel between 10 days to 1 year
Transits must be less than 24 hours
Stopovers are more than 24 hours

They make it sound so easy, i.e. pick destinations, pick flights, input personal details, and pay. Not mentioned by Star-Alliance, but it is often mentioned that you can land in one airport and leave from another. It is also often mentioned that you must always travel in the same direction, either east to west or vice versa, but that it is possible to backtrack a bit on the same continent.

Interestingly Miles & More also offer a RTW, but with different conditions, namely:-

Travel must be at least 10 days, and the ticket remains valid for 12 months after departure of the first flight segment.
It includes one crossing of the Atlantic and one crossing of the Pacific.
It is limited to 10 flight segments, and up to seven stopovers.
An economy ticket would be 180,000 award miles.
You can only book this flight award by telephone.

oneworld also claims to offer a RTW, but its difficult to see immediately what this means and what the conditions are.

And there are specialist travel companies that also offer RTW, e.g. Trailfinders offers seven different routes. This blog post “Round-the-world flight ticket: good or bad idea?” is worth a read. For example, it looks at just buying separate one-way tickets as an alternative, and there are a number of practical advantages and disadvantages.