No one really talks about this in any decisive form. Sure everyone mentions you can purchase a single round the world fare from one of the partner alliances (OneWorld, Star Alliance, etc.) or you can just book one way flights as you go, but no one ever gives you much more than that.
Due to the ease of the round the world ticket that was our first choice. You pick your stops, buy the ticket and you’re off. It, however, is not quite that simple. We started with the OneWorld fares, everything seemed to work out, we could travel for 16 segments, we had to fly in one direction between continents, all pretty standard stuff. Basically days before we decided to pull the trigger we discovered our 16 segments (stops) didn’t include any layovers we might encounter which depending on the alliance you choose and where in the world you are planning to travel could be significant. So with that news all of our flight planning was out the window…
Luckily we’ve managed to connect with several people who are either currently on a world trip or have already taken one. With some real world suggestions we’ve decided to go with the one way ticket idea. It allows for the utmost flexibility and quite frankly adds quite a bit to the adventure. Now I guess the key to the one way ticket is actually being able to book that next ticket, or group of tickets. Here’s where one of my new favorite travel companions comes in, a computer! The next suggestion was to bring a computer on the trip, which is something we initially decided against, even though I’m a huge geek. After this suggestion it really seemed to make sense and not just for the sake of booking tickets, but also being able to more easily keep in touch as well as one of the other challenges: managing the gigabytes of photos we’d be taking along the way (I’ll post more about the photography issue later).
So there you have it. We are going with the one way ticket and I get to bring another gadget. Our plan is to book our first few legs ahead of time and then any major flights well in advance, but anything local or spur of the moment will be on the fly (pun intended).
The only issue with the one way tickets is that some airlines won't let you board without having a departure ticket from the country you're entering. That happened to me going from Hong Kong to Thailand. Wrote a whole post about it on my blog.
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