One Year Away

Joseph

Over the last couple of months we’ve been looking at our options for flights.  It seems to breakdown into three main choices:

1) Buy an Around the World pass from one of the major airline alliances.  Star Alliance and OneWorld offer two of the better known ones.  The pass allows you to make a certain number of flights (20 for Star Alliance) on any alliance carrier for a fixed price.  The biggest catch is that you have to travel in one continuous direction (east to west or west to east).  This option seems to be good if you have a relatively certain itinerary, will be visiting major cities and your direction of travel allows you to fit into the various restrictions on the tickets.

2) Buy a series of tickets from a ticket consolidator.  We went to speak with a travel agent who specializes in around the world itineraries last weekend.  This seems to be a good option if you have a firm itinerary but it doesn’t fit into the Around the World restrictions.  In both Option 1 and 2 you can change the date of travel, however, choosing to skip or change a destination can become difficult.

3) Buy tickets as you go.  With Internet sites like Kayak.com and others that search for cheap fares on all the airlines it’s easy to book your own flights on the road.  The  downsides to doing this are potentially not getting the flight you want on the day you want or at the price you want.  You also have to deal with getting all your flights from the road which can add some extra work/stress.

I compared the flight costs for using a travel agent (Option 2) versus buying our own series of one-way flights (Option 3).  Although the difference was small I was able to find lower prices on the net than what was quoted to me by the travel agent.

In the end we decided to go with Option 3.  What swayed us was the flexibility of buying flights to any destination at any time.  We’ll take the risk that cost might be higher or that we may not get the exact dates we want.  I’ll let you know in a year if we made the right choice!