By Chris Lopinto, Huffington Post
For your next big trip, what if you could take advantage of a single airline ticket to check several destinations off your travel wish list for a fraction of the time and expense of seeing them one at a time?
cheap flights
I recently talked with Jenny McIver , a Round-the-World (RTW) travel pro to get the lowdown on this interesting travel strategy. To begin, let’s define what a Round-the-World (RTW) ticket is. It’s simply a multi-stop airline ticket traveling east or west and crossing over both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. You can travel for as little as a week or as long as a year. All of the major airlines offer RTW tickets, but many people aren’t even aware they exist. Why? Because they were originally created for international executives making multi-stop business trips. The airlines don’t market this option to consumers, but anyone can buy one and if they’ve been saving up frequent flier miles, there’s no greater redemption value. If you don’t have the miles, the best fares can often be found with a RTW ticket specialist like BootsnAll or AirTreks.
If your vacation time is limited to the traditional two weeks, RTW can be the perfect way to see more of the world in less time. Let’s take a look at what’s possible with two weeks and a RTW ticket. For our sample RTW itinerary, we’ll include some of the world’s most popular destinations like the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall. To break up the flights a little, let’s add stopovers in Paris and Honolulu. Here’s what the trip looks like if we start in New York:
New York – Paris – Cairo – New Delhi – Beijing – Honolulu – New York
Now, pick your favorite airline booking site (we used Kayak.com) to estimate the cost of individual round-trip flights to each destination. Then, price the same itinerary using a RTW ticket specialist (we used BootsnAll.com) for a single RTW ticket. Here are the results:
Kayak.com (Roundtrip) | Price | Total Flight Time
Lowest Price…………….. | $4,852 | 191 hours
Shortest Flight Time*.. | $8,725 | 115 hours
*All nonstop flights
BootsnAll.com (RTW)…. | Price |Total Flight Time
Lowest Price*……………. | $2,973 | 78 hours
Shortest Flight Time…. | $6,007 | 53 hours
*Two nonstop flights, four with one stop
The cost savings of nearly $2,000 is obvious and substantial — but it’s the time savings that is truly staggering. Consider that with the higher priced roundtrip flights you’ll also spend 113 more hours in the air than with the RTW ticket. That’s almost three entire work weeks! I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend those three weeks seeing the world, not the inside of an airplane.
Read the full article by Chris Lopinto from Huffington Post.
