Travel around the World Flight Ticket

Around the world flights | Travel Associates NZ

How about a sightseeing flight around the world? Have you always wanted to travel to more than one destination on the same vacation, or have you always wanted to cancel these trips to long-haul locations like Europe? Besides excellent value for your investment, there are countless flight and routing options that take full advantages of various airlines' alliance and partnership arrangements.

Many travelers travel from New Zealand on their way to Europe through Asia or the Middle East and then travel back home via North America or the other way around. When you fly with an air carrier, you must travel via their hubs (e.g. Dubai with Emirates) & your flight possibilities may be restricted due to the destination they or their partners serve.

With Oneworld, Star Alliance and SkyTeam, the world's premier carriers and their airline network are brought together to offer you more opportunities for your next itinerary. The prices are either calculated on the number of kilometres driven or the number of stop.

Like we got a Round the World ticket for under $700 each.

We are travelling this year with a missions and cross lands from our Before Babies Bucket Schedule. Hopefully we will be able to expand our families over the next few years, so we thought it was appropriate to go to destinations more difficult to discover with small kids. As we first set out to schedule our trips for 2017, we had a dozen goals on our schedule.

Walking, scuba dancing, off the beaten track and other adventure that is simply not for children under the age of 5. Following some back and forth, we have refined our schedule to 15 different targets spread across 5 different continents. Aeroplanes! Almost always, air travel accounts for most of our travel costs, and while we try to travel across country wherever possible, there are some air travel that we simply cannot escape.

The magic world of FFP points was unveiled for the first in Australia. One of our friends (who coincidentally worked for Virgin Airlines at the time) proposed that we stop using our debit cards to pay for things and use credits instead. We took their help to our hearts and requested a Qantas Vielflieger-Punkte-Kreditkarte through our Oz based banking facility.

In Australia we had no loan record, but at that point we still worked full hours and had full hours in order to benefit from a good deal. Couple week later we got our first 50,000 dollar reward and a brilliant new one. "All we need is two more rewards and we'd have enough for a round the world trip," Max realised after having spent some quality qualifying period to determine the value of our hard-earned points.

Henceforth we were possessed by collecting frequent flyer points. So we put all our money accounts on loan, purchased all our food on loan and even found a third firm that would allow us to repay our rents on loan (this was a big hack). Also, we made use of our local flight points by making all our work-related bookings (and there were some) with Qantas.

Over the next 2 years we have kept a careful watch on the range of available credits and requested 3 more over the next 2 years (Max got 2 more, but I only got 1). On leaving Australia, our frequent flyer account had well over 160,000 points each, enough to get us a OneWorld Round The World ticket (and more).

See Nomadic Matt's contribution on how he earned 1 million frequent flyer points per year! Well, that's SERIOUS Travel Hacking! In those 2 years we could have spend them on various other planes, but we stuck to them because we knew that the RTW ticket expenses would bring us the greatest blow for our money.

Our route included 5 continents: In North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa and flying to each of these cities would be between $500 and $1,000 per passenger per trip. An RTW flight would be saving us tens of billions of dollars! Less money for flying means we can enjoy amazing things like canoeing on the South Patagonian ice!

Unfortunately, information on how to book an RTW flight with frequent flyer points was not readily available on the OneWorld website. We had to search the Internet to collect the information and spent countless working hours on the telephone with Qantas Frequent Flyer employees to put together the following route.

It' s noteworthy that we have 2 segment with independant tours: Hongkong to Hanoi - we travelled from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur, then to Danang in Vietnam and finally to Hanoi. From Nairobi to Dar Es Salaam - during our stay in Africa we are planning this year the way from Kenya to Tanzania via land.

A further important thing to consider is that our actual travel routes do not actually correspond to the above routes, as none of our planes are directly. After adding all the links, our travel plan was more like this: Travelling hackers do that all the while! All your spending is on your credits, but make it smart.

When you have a major cash point that gives you 2x or 3x points for food, use it for food. When another map gives you 3x more points on petrol, use it to buy petrol. By flying often, you become faithful to an air carrier so that you can maximise the points accumulated on each flight.

For each flight you make, it can be advantageous to earn a little more to earn more points. As a rule, these are received via newsletter or other frequently travelled programs. A RTW flight is the best way to make your money. However, building an RTW flight path for reward points is not simple.

To qualify as a OneWorld Reward Flight, your travel route must comply with the following requirements: Remember that flexibility in appointments and goals can help you significantly lower the amount of tax you end up having to pay on your ticket. On the American Airlines website and the Qantas website, we have found flight points that can be cashed in using the flight finder to find suitable flight points for each stage of our RTW route.

A few flight were only on the AA side, others only on the Qantas side, so it's definitely a good idea to check both. Where possible, remove London transit traffic and refrain from British Airways traffic to lower tax and surcharge rates. It was the longest and hardest part of our quest, as none of our flight was straight, so every new link, every new alternate itinerary added mile to our distance and often sent us well over the 35,000 mile mark (we used the Great Circle Mapper to guess the overall mileage).

After creating a working route, we noted all flight numbers, the applicable departures and arrivals flight numbers and estimated the tax for our route using ITA Matrix. Our first route was taxed at over $1,200 each. Trusting that we could do better, we analysed each stage of our RTW flight route to find out which routes were collecting the most tax and sought ways to substitute them with less expensive ones.

Below is a breakdown of our flight from San Jose to Nairobi with the corresponding charges and tax that make up the ticket fare. On the first line are the real costs of the ticket (which we pay with points), the remainder are Tax. After we were satisfied with our route and the tax estimates, we phoned Qantas Frequent Flyer Support to try to make reservations.

About 10 telephone conversations and many telephone call with our customer service representatives were needed to complete our route. For half the amount of times we had phoned, employees hadn't yet received an RTW OneWorld Reward Ticket and were very baffled about the details of such a reservation, so we had to spend countless working days queuing for acknowledgement from their superiors.

Sometimes our chosen planes would be out of stock and we would have to return to the drawing table. In the end, however, we found a itinerary that worked and would just charge us $650 apiece, an astonishing offer given the number of departures, stays and destinations we will be attending in the next 6 month.

With a number of great carriers we fly around the world and look forward to our expertise. There' s only one thing we don't look forward to - economy accommodation flight. We will try it this year, but something says that we will fly on our next RTW flight plan the next flight plan which will be our next one.

That' s only 250,000 OneWorld points for those people!