Best way to Book round the World Flights

A round-the-world fare.

To book your RTW (Round the World) journey

Purchasing an RWT is not as easy as purchasing any airline ticketing. When you plan a multi-day tour around the world, the ticketing procedure is different (and usually more complex). This article will show you three different ways to buy your PTTs, their advantages and disadvantages.

What are the ticket prices around the world? Round the World (RTW) fares are multi-stop air fares that take you around the world, often much less expensive than buying the flights separately. Whilst you have to select your stopovers in Advance, you usually still have room for manoeuvre with your itinerary. Your journey can last up to a year in most cases.

Whether the number of permitted stop points is minimal or maximal will depend on the nature of the return journey and the way you book your journey. While the best way to book an R&TW journey is through a dedicated R&TW agency, you can also buy R&TW passes directly from airlines or try to create your own route.

Each of the methodologies we will discuss here has its advantages and disadvantages. You can book your journey with us in several ways, each with different advantages and disadvantages: Reserving your own ticket may be the simplest way, but it also has some big disadvantages. The Google Flights, Momondo and Skyscanner are some of the best custom flight searching sites, and you can use different methodologies to find flights at low prices.

Those are good for point to point tours, but quite horrible for multi-stop tours (we'll discuss this later). Individual ticket bookings can be useful if you want to maximise your travel options - for example, if you want to leave Australia entirely after half of your journey and go to China instead, you still have this choice.

In contrast to the RTW package of the airlines you can use any of them. They may have noted that one-way journeys are not just calculated with half a round-trip fare, but are usually 75% of the cost of the return flight. An RTW ticketing is a purchase made by an air carrier association.

The Star Alliance, One World and Sky Team are offering multiple station ticket services on behalf of each other. In addition to these partnerships, Air New Zealand, Virgin Atlantic and Singapore Airlines also provide Rotary Thrift Travel through a joint venture known as The Great Escapade. Not part of an airline group, Emerirates provides some tours of the world in cooperation with other airlines.

RTW fares involve you creating your whole trip in Advance, although you still have some flexibility with your flights. When you buy, you specify an estimated date for each trip, but these can often be modified later. The RTW offer of each carrier has different regulations regarding tracking, the overall number of permitted stations, different restrictions on land segment (so-called "surface sectors") and different levels of overall cover.

Today, you no longer need a tour operator just to book a point-to-point trip (as you can do yourself ), but the use of a specialised RTW tour operator is quite different. Once I took a look behind the curtains at an RTW reservation office and was sitting next to one of their specialist travellers when they put together a route.

A number of special purpose Rotary Foundation (RTW) agents exist, including AirTreks in the USA and Canada, Travel Nation in the UK and Europe and Roundabout in Australia. So if you just want to schedule your tour, and especially if you want to do something special, I suggest you check it out.

If you are planning to book your flights in advance, it is very likely that working with an agent will help you safe your budget and give you a better route.