Round-the-world flight ticket: good or bad idea?

If you don't plan to travel around the world on foot, by bike, or by sailboat, you'll inevitably have to consider the issue of airline tickets for your trip around the world. And to do that, there aren't 36 solutions: either you buy your plane tickets as you go, or you buy a round-the-world ticket. In this chapter, we will weigh the pros and cons of these two methods and provide advice on finding the cheapest air tickets according to your round-the-world itinerary.

Definition of round-the-world tickets

Round-the-world (RTW) tickets are, in fact, a set of plane tickets that allow you to travel around the world in one direction or another with certain conditions. The principle is very simple: you have several flights that take you to an airport but can depart from another. Between these flights, you can simply travel by bus, train, or on foot and explore the country before heading to the next airport.

Conditions of round-the-world plane tickets

Obviously, there are a few rules that must be respected with these round-the-world tickets.

• The duration between the first and last flight cannot exceed 1 year.
• You must always travel in the same direction, either east to west or vice versa. This rule is not to be taken literally because, on the same continent, it is sometimes possible to backtrack a bit.
• You can only cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans once.
• There is generally a limited number of flights per continent.
• You must return to the country of origin.

Pros and cons of round-the-world tickets

Pros	Cons
Prices are often competitive.	Less flexible than buying tickets as you go, depending on your desires.
Flight dates can be changed for free (just like the destinations, paying a little extra).	The 1-year limit can be restrictive. For example, we lost our last flight because we extended our trip by a few months.
The budget for your RTW trip is planned easily because you pay for all the plane tickets before the trip.	A round-the-world ticket is not necessarily cheaper than buying tickets as you go, especially if you are an expert at buying plane tickets
Some visas can be obtained more easily because some countries require an onward plane ticket as proof of leaving the country (e.g. China) but we will return to this below
No hassle of looking for the cheapest flight for the next destination.
Thanks to round-the-world tickets, you can sometimes visit places like Easter Island practically for free.
We accumulate miles with the airline loyalty program.

There are different ways to buy round-the-world tickets, but as we will explain to you below, there is really only one right way 😉.

How to buy round-the-world plane tickets

Airline alliances and airlines

The first way to purchase a round-the-world ticket is through one of the three major airline alliances, StarAlliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam, using their online tools. The disadvantage is the number of sections in your route which is limited to 16.

Believe us, we tried but we never managed to obtain interesting and competitive prices using alliances and airlines. We did some simulations so you can form your own opinion. Otherwise, we'll let you make your own experience using the links below. FYI, very few travelers leave with an airline alliance.

StarAlliance

Star Alliance is the largest alliance with 26 airlines worldwide (Air China, Thai Airways, Air New Zealand, etc.). It serves the most destinations (over 1300), especially in Asia and South America. The simulation tool is well done with an interactive map, and in a few minutes, you have an estimate of the price for your round-the-world ticket.

Oneworld

Oneworld, with 13 airlines, mainly covers North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Its planning tool is not the most practical. Here, you need to enter the stages in a chat (which is not very responsive), where a bot changes cities as you wish. Sometimes it rearranges the itinerary without notice, which can be cumbersome. Finally, dates cannot be manually changed in the summary table; you have to go through the chat. In short, Oneworld has not prioritized practicality, it is very laborious, and we much prefer the StarAlliance tool!

SkyTeam

SkyTeam's services for round-the-world tickets are suspended until further notice.

Emirates and Air New Zealand

Additionally, there are individual airlines Air Tahiti Nui (in partnership with Emirates) and Air New Zealand also offer round-the-world tickets.

To date, Air Tahiti Nui has suspended this service since the pandemic.

The Air New Zealand airline, part of Star Alliance, independently offers round-the-world tickets. However, the destinations served are limited. In addition to going through New Zealand, there are a few stops in Asia and South America. The airline logically emphasizes Oceania and North America. You'll have Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo and Osaka on the Asian side, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu and Buenos Aires on the other side of the Pacific.

To simulate and purchase the ticket, you need to use a tool for multi-destination tickets. On one hand, the guided search works well but only offers 3 stops. It's difficult to get a precise idea of the price with 4 flights if you want to explore Southeast Asia and South America. For example, for a route Paris – Singapore – Christchurch – Singapore, the base ticket price is 2470 euros. To create a complete itinerary, it will be more difficult to get an estimate; I have never been able to find available flights. Last resort: contact them directly!

In conclusion, going through Air New Zealand is more advantageous than going through an alliance if you want to focus on a small part of Asia, explore Australia and New Zealand, and maybe end up in North America.

Specialized travel agencies for trips around the world

The most common (and best) alternative is to use one of the various travel agencies that specialize in round-the-world tickets. But why are they cheaper compared to airline alliances?

It's actually quite simple to understand. Since specialized agencies are not limited to specific airlines, they can combine offers from companies in different alliances and add different flights in between. And like many travel professionals, they have access to special offers that are not available to the general public.

By using these agencies, you'll also get a personalized round-the-world ticket tailored to your journey and preferences. The advisors at these travel agencies are well-versed in the airfare market and can help you find the right balance between ticket prices and your travel desires. For example, they can suggest alternative routes to lower the cost of your plane ticket or, conversely, propose additional interesting stops that won't significantly increase the total price. In our case, adding Easter Island cost us only an additional 30 euros!

To purchase an RTW ticket with a specialized agency, all you need to do is contact them and request a quote, which will usually be refined through email or phone communication. Here is a list of international specialized travel agencies that we recommend.

Travel Nation

Travel Nation is a British agency highly appreciated by world travelers for its online process, even though it prioritizes a bit more telephone contact than emails. They have several advisors specialized in creating round-the-world tickets.

You can easily check all their offers here or directly ask for a free personalized quote. During our round-the-world trip preparation, we also asked them for a quote for our itinerary, but the price proposed by Travel Nation was higher than Zip World's offer.

Our experience with Travel Nation:

• Liked: personalized contact by email or phone with our advisor. We liked being able to discuss our wishes with him over the phone. He gave us many good tips to lower the price of our tickets, as well as offers for nice and free stopovers. The feeling was great.
• Less liked: the machine was a bit slow to start. Radio silence for 3 weeks after the quote request. We had to call them to learn that the advisor who received our request was on vacation. Well, it's a small issue that can happen. In any case, after contacting them by phone, we didn't have any further issues to report.

Air Treks

AirTreks is one of the most well-known agencies for round-the-world tickets and international multi-stop flights. They have been in the business since 1987 and have been trusted by many backpackers.

One thing I really like about AirTreks is that they created a nice trip planner that allows you to create any custom itinerary and directly get an approximate quote. Of course, they also have special round-the-world ticket offers that often are more affordable. One additional thing, with AirTreks, be sure to ask if you can change the dates of your flights for no additional costs (as it’s an important feature of an rtw ticket in our opinion).

Flight Centre

Flight Center is a reputable Australian travel agency and has several offices across the Commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and the United Kingdom).

After completing the quote request, you will be put in contact with an advisor by email and telephone to establish the round-the-world ticket that best meets your needs.

Some tips to lower round-the-world ticket prices

• Limit the number of flights: it may sound simple, but the fewer flights your round-the-world ticket has, the cheaper it will be. (And it's also better for the environment, but we'll talk about that later.) So, limit small flights as much as possible and prefer land routes when you can.
• Change the departure city: for example, we left from Lyon instead of Geneva, which reduced the bill by almost 600 euros!
• Use hubs: hubs are those huge airports with very heavy air traffic. Think of Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney, Santiago, Buenos Aires... Since there are many flights to these airports, prices are generally more affordable.
• Limit the number of continents/sectors: at the end of our world tour, we wanted to leave from Central America. But since this added an extra "continent," the price of our round-the-world tickets was significantly increased. As a result, we preferred to focus on South America.

In general, the agencies will know how to advise you and incorporate these kinds of tips to lower the price of your RTW plane tickets.

Multi-stop flight tickets

Multi-city tickets are offered by several online flight comparison websites to book flights to different destinations in one ticket, without searching for tickets one by one. In essence, you can create your own round-the-world ticket! But, as you can imagine, these types of tickets also have drawbacks.

Pros	Cons
Prices may be cheaper than buying individual tickets or round-the-world tickets depending on the itinerary.	You lose a lot of flexibility because you cannot change flight dates for free.

Here are some flight comparison websites (which we'll talk about a bit later) that we regularly use and that offer this type of ticket:

• Momondo
• Kiwi
• Skyscanner

But in our humble opinion, multi-city stop tickets are not very interesting for world travelers. If you decide to buy your tickets in advance, you might as well keep the flexibility of round-the-world tickets, which guarantees you can change flight dates for free by simply contacting your agency. So, unless the price difference is huge with the quote for your RTW ticket, we don't recommend multi-destination tickets too much.

If you don't find what you're looking for among the methods we've discussed so far, I think you're better off buying your tickets individually.

Buying one-way tickets

Buying tickets one by one, as you go along the trip, is obviously the most common alternative to round-the-world tickets. We know several travelers who set off without booking their tickets in advance.

Pros and cons of one-way tickets

Pros	Cons
If you manage well, the total price may be cheaper than for round-the-world tickets.	It can take a lot of time during the journey to search flight comparison websites or others to find the cheapest plane tickets.
It offers maximum flexibility. If you feel like changing your plans at the last moment or traveling for an additional year, nothing prevents you.	It is not the most practical for budgeting your trip before departure.
By using major hubs, you can surely find interesting ticket offers.	However, for some destinations like Easter Island or Hawaii, where few airlines go, you will have to pay a high price if you want to go there (with round-the-world tickets, there are often good offers for these destinations).
	It may be more difficult to cross borders and obtain a visa without a continuation ticket as proof of leaving a country, even though there are solutions today.

Plane tickets purchased separately: how to travel around the world without a return ticket

Embarking on an RTW trip by purchasing one-way tickets sometimes means not having a return ticket, which serves as proof that you will indeed leave the territory. Note that in Asia and America, it is crucial to pay attention to this point. There are several more or less legal ways to circumvent this issue, risking visa denial (for some countries), getting stuck at the border, or being denied boarding (which has happened to travelers we know). Here, we'll present methods that allow you to continue with your world tour or long-term journey completely legally.

• Keep calm! Since this check remains somewhat random, maintaining a relaxed attitude can sometimes suffice, and you may not encounter any issues.
• If that doesn't work and you're asked for a return ticket, play dumb by stating that your electronic ticket is not printed, and is in your computer, located in your luggage. There are two scenarios: the immigration officer trusts you, and you're good to go, or it doesn't work, and you need to consider the following solutions.
• Book a hotel room on Booking in another country, Make a reservation that you'll cancel once you cross the border (just ensure it's a refundable room!).
• If You're in America, purchase a plane ticket from the American airline United Airlines to a neighboring country. All their tickets are fully refundable within 24 hours.
• If You're in Asia or Anywhere: The last solution is to rent a plane ticket. We haven't personally tested this method, but we know many people who have. In short, a safe and 100% legal solution to continue your world tour! Onward Ticket offers to book a flight by providing you with a real nominative plane ticket. Confirmation is immediate, and you receive your ticket by email in less than a minute! The ticket is automatically canceled after 48 hours. The price? Starting from $16 per ticket.

The method to find a cheap flight

As you may have noticed, the price of airplane tickets varies enormously, making it challenging to make sense of it, and sometimes prices seem illogical. For example, a ticket from Geneva to Zurich to Berlin might be cheaper than taking the direct Zurich to Berlin flight. Or, a round-trip ticket is sometimes cheaper than a one-way ticket. It makes no sense, and we agree…

Of course, airlines' sole purpose is to maximize their profit, and they engage in Yield Management (they have lots of super-smart people with Ph.D.s working on it!). So, airplane ticket prices constantly fluctuate based on various criteria such as:

• occupancy rate;
• fill rate;
• airport taxes;
• kerosene price;
• demand;
• competition on a specific route;
• booking date;
• flight time;
• and probably many others...

There are hundreds of techniques to try to find the cheapest airplane tickets. But if you're on a round-the-world trip, the goal is not to spend half your days searching for the best ticket prices for your next destination. Here's the method we use to buy our airplane tickets at a good price without too much hassle.

Know the right price for a specific flight

For this, we recommend using the excellent website of the French start-up AlgoFly. Enter your departure point and desired destination to get a good idea of what is a good price for your route and the best time of the year to buy it.

Algofly is not yet available in English but it’s still a very good tool to have an idea of what a good price is for a flight. So until they have an English version available, just let your browser translate the website.

Note: Algofly also allows you to buy your airplane tickets, but we find their flight search tool less flexible than the 3 comparators we present below.

Buy the best airplane ticket

Now that you know the right price range, you need to find the best possible offer for the route you want to take. There's no real secret to this; you'll have to compare prices using the best airplane ticket comparators on the market. Yes! Depending on the desired itinerary, it's rarely the same comparator that will give you the best price! Over the years, we've tried quite a few tools and have always found the best prices on:

• Momondo
• Skyscanner
• Kiwi

As you'll be around the world, you'll likely be flexible with dates, times, and even the departure and destination airports for your flight. And believe us:

Flexibility is the key to finding the best-priced airplane tickets!

These three websites help you compare prices flexibly and intelligently. Let's go through each comparator to see how to use them to find the best price for an airplane ticket between Germany and Thailand, for example. You could be more specific about the airports, but as we mentioned, flexibility is the key.

Skyscanner

Skyscanner allows for quite detailed and flexible searches.

Taking our example of a flight between Germany and Thailand, you simply enter Germany as the origin, Thailand as the destination, and choose a specific date or the entire month for flexible dates. Then, Skyscanner will first propose the cheapest destinations in Thailand (Bangkok, Chiang Mai, etc.), followed by the departure airport with the best offers (Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, etc.), before displaying a list or calendar with all the flights.

Momondo

The Momondo search engine also allows you to conduct in-depth and flexible searches.

After indicating Germany in the origin field and choosing up to 3 departure airports, enter a city or country in the destination field and provide an approximate date for your flight before launching the search. The displayed result is well thought out as you get the best results for the chosen date and a small graph with the best prices for the days before and after the selected date. This makes it easy to select dates with the cheapest flights.

For our part, we really like this search engine, and we often find better prices on Momondo than on Skyscanner.

Kiwi

Kiwi is certainly the most flexible and innovative airplane ticket search engine we've tried so far.

In addition to searching between Germany and Thailand for a certain period, Kiwi integrates a super handy map on which you can draw departure and destination perimeters. So, you can make queries like finding the cheapest flight by starting 250 km around Berlin and arriving 500 km around Bangkok for the first two weeks of November. This often allows us to find travel itineraries we wouldn't have thought of!

So, if using these three mentioned comparators, you find airplane ticket offers that are in the right price range indicated by AlgoFly for the route you want, don't hesitate too much! Buy those precious tickets because the idea is precisely not to lose hours getting your cheap airplane tickets!

You can also use these comparators to set up email alerts for a flight you're interested in. But for them to be truly effective, you need to plan. Therefore, flexibility is still reduced, which was the main reason for buying airplane tickets one by one.

The price of a round-the-world ticket: a case study to make the right choice

It's challenging to tell you how much a round-the-world ticket costs, given that the price depends on your itinerary and the prices of airplane tickets purchased as you go vary depending on when you conduct your search. But to give you a small idea, we've established a typical itinerary for an 8-month world tour with current rates:

Paris - Bangkok - Siem Reap // Hanoi - Christchurch // Auckland - Quito - Lima // La Paz - Santiago de Chile // Punta Arenas - Buenos Aires // Cordoba - Paris

You often see this type of notation for round-the-world itineraries: "-" represents flight segments, and "//" represents segments traveled by road.

• Alliances and Airlines: we tried various tools from airline alliances for more or less this itinerary and never managed to get a better price than 4000 euros.
• Agencies for custom round-the-world tickets: we asked for quotes from the different agencies mentioned above and we got prices varying between 3900 and 6000 euros.
• Buying individual airplane tickets: as it's impossible to know how much a ticket will cost at a given time on a flight comparator, I thought a figure that might be interesting would be the sum of the good prices on AlgoFly for each stage. We arrive at 3800 euros per person.

Obviously, these figures are indicative. You may find prices higher or lower, whether it's for a round-the-world ticket from a specialized agency or buying them one by one.

Our choice for the round-the-world trip

Agencies' RTW tickets

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, we chose to go with round-the-world tickets because:

• we thought we would travel for only 1 year;
• we found the price quite reasonable by adding Easter Island to our itinerary.;
• the flexibility to change our flight dates for free was sufficient;
• we didn't want to bother with airplane tickets during the journey.

And if we had to do it again, would we change anything?

It's a difficult question to answer. Our RTW ticket did not limit our flexibility at all since we changed the dates of almost all our tickets (except the first one). However, we traveled for 19 months and therefore missed our last flight. As a result, we had to buy a new ticket to return to Switzerland from South America.

On one hand, I think that if we hadn't taken round-the-world tickets, we might have saved some money (although that remains to be verified). On the other hand, maybe we wouldn't have been to Easter Island because we might have found the airplane tickets too expensive along the way. For example, when we were in Quito, we didn't go to the Galapagos because of the exorbitant price of the tickets. We might not have spent a few weeks in Taiwan either, even though it's one of our favorite destinations.

What is certain is that these round-the-world tickets seemed to be the best choice at the time of departure and did not limit us in our journey in any way. At that time, we didn't have much experience with long journeys, and having a rough itinerary with airplane tickets already purchased reassured us.

However, since our trip around the world, we've gained experience! Now, if we were to go on another long journey, we would probably try to minimize the number of flights in favor of land transportation. Over time, we realized that there are beautiful things to see everywhere, and the most beautiful experiences don't necessarily happen where you expect them the most!

Plane tickets and climate change

Calculate your carbon footprint

When we talk about round-the-world tickets, it's also very important to talk about climate change. Keep in mind that the plane is the most polluting means of transportation currently, especially during takeoff and landing. Therefore, short-distance flights proportionally pollute the most.

Honestly, we weren't fully aware of the problem when we left for our world tour (and it's perhaps a bit hypocritical to talk about it now). But today, going on a trip around the world that includes more than 15 flights in 1 year requires some thought.

In travel as in everyday life, transportation has the most significant impact on carbon footprint. Therefore, there's only one solution if you want to travel around the world in the most responsible way possible: you must limit the number of flights as much as possible! Take to the air only for long flights across oceans, such as between Australia and South America or South America and Europe. Avoid short flights as much as possible and always prefer land transportation like walking, cycling, train, or bus, which pollute much less than airplanes (and are often cheaper!). We talked about it when planning your stages, but slow travel is a good way to enjoy every moment, taking your time on the road while having a lower carbon footprint.

If you use the a-contresens planner to trace your trip around the world itinerary, the tool will give you an estimate of your CO₂ emissions for your trip. Otherwise, you can use a calculator like the one from GoodPlanet and find equivalences with everyday things on OpenCO₂.

Compensate

You can also compensate for your CO₂ emissions by financing projects that promote the reduction or absorption of greenhouse gases, such as reforestation or enhancement of biodiversity. Obviously, we encourage you to offset your carbon emissions by financially supporting such projects. But always try to reduce your emissions as much as possible before compensating for the rest with such projects. You don't solve the problem by taking 25 flights in 1 year and buying a clear conscience by paying to offset your CO₂ emissions.

There you go, we hope you have all the information to make the best choice for your round-the-world ticket! In the next chapter, we'll tackle the less fun but crucial topic: health for a round-the-world trip! We'll scrutinize vaccines, travel insurance… All that jazz 🙂.

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