I’m working on it!

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My first order of business, once we’d picked up our new passports this week, was booking our “Round-The-World” (RTW) airline tickets with the StarAlliance network of airlines.

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I’ve planned most of our pre- and post-retirement travels, including 3 consecutive months travelling just carryon in Europe and England in 2022, but both our previous “world” trips were multi-month cruises with Viking. On those, we packed much more than when we land travel, had to unpack just once, and Viking arranged all our flights, tours, accommodation, and even most of the food, so once our fare was paid and our excursions chosen, my “work” was done.

This time, it’s all down to us/me. Ted and I have been looking at the option for an around the world airline ticket for a couple of years now; during that time I’ve been playing with the website planning tool and dozens of potential itineraries. Last month, after returning from our last world cruise, we had a better idea of places to which we’d like to return for longer stays.

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It looked deceptively easy on the website, but the rules under “How to Map Your Journey” are key – and can (as I found out through trial and error) be problematic.

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Mapping the journey in just one global direction was “fun”.

Until I started using a map with lines of longitude, I’d make mistakes like going to Warsaw before Krakow after arriving in Poland from Greece, only to have a complete itinerary rejected because I’d changed my western path around the world to include a flight going east. Unfortunately, the journey building tool does not flag those kinds of errors as they are happening, so all the work involved in planning the trip is wasted. (Lesson #1: write down all the dates and information you’ll need to re-enter!)

Then there are the maximum 15 stops.

Fifteen stops does not mean fifteen destinations; it includes every transfer point (flight “leg”). I quickly learned to find direct flights, but in some cases that impacted where we’d choose to stay. For instance, there are direct StarAlliance network flights from Sydney Australia to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, but not to Penang. Of course, we can still choose a train or commuter flight (of which there are many) between KL and Penang, but that transportation needs to be booked separately from the RTW tickets.

ASIDE: Business Class? Why, yes! The entire RTW ticket in Business Class is only marginally more expensive than a round-trip Business Class from Vancouver to Auckland alone. We were both shocked and pleasantly surprised.

After figuring out direction and legs, the first real glitch occurred when the website would not let me book into next June (I’d been playing with fake dates until now, just trying to estimate price) despite the rules allowing a trip spanning 365 days. An email through the “contact us” portal put me in touch with an agent to whom I was able to send my desired dates. He added them to my itinerary and updated it for me on the website.

On to the details.

Now that I had – and had saved – a working itinerary, the next step was to choose the actual flights. Time of day has the biggest impact, because we really don’t want to depart – or arrive – in the wee hours of the morning (in which range I also include 6:00 a.m.) if possible, but stopovers and availability of Business Class seats also affect what we choose. Some flights only have Economy seats available (and the RTW ticket is priced by “class”). Some flights make multiple stops, impacting our total 15 legs.

Flights chosen, it was time to pay, but due to a “technical error” I couldn’t complete the payment online. Another quick email gave me options to call or be called to complete the process. Rather than risk having to dictate credit card information on my cell phone while out walking, or sitting around waiting for a call, I chose to phone in.

Here’s where I realized what a different world Business Class air travel really is. There was a dedicated phone number, and my call was answered ON THE FIRST RING! (The fact that the RTW ticket support for Star Alliance is done by Lufthansa doesn’t hurt.)

So we’re booked. We’ve even been able to get our preferred seats (lay-flat beds on all the long flights) on each plane. We were able to do that within the RTW website, but when the payment technical error occurred, it also wiped out our seat choices; the RTW email support team very quickly recreated them for us, and we’ve been able to confirm them on each of the individual airlines’ apps.

(So that’s another thing: airline apps. We now have several, to allow us to do online check-ins and track flight changes, although we’ll also get email updates.)

Below is what our itinerary looks like in “overview”. The flexibility of the ticket means that if things change in the world – or with our health or family – we can re-route or return to Canada.

152 days.

7 countries: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Greece, Poland, England.

11 countries’ airports (we have short layovers but no actual stays in Turkey, Japan, Belgium, and Germany).

13 legs.

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The longest “trip” is actually not the one from Vancouver to Auckland, the length of which was what decided us on Business Class for these tickets (it is the longest non-stop flight at just under 14 hours). Sydney Australia to Kuala Lumpur clocks in at over 21 hours. Interestingly, because they’re not direct flights, when the layovers are included the trips getting from Kuala Lumpur to Crete (19-1/2 hours) and home from Manchester to Vancouver (16 hours) are also both longer travel days than that first long direct flight.

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The airports, of course, don’t tell the whole story. In each country we’ll be staying in more than one city, although never in one place for less than a full week. We don’t want to feel as if we’re rushing through a to-do list; we want to stop and smell the roses … and the eucalyptus, the freshly ground spices, the fragrant teas, the delicious foods, and even the unique perfume of humanity in each place we visit.

I’ve already created accommodation trip boards for places we’d like to stay in each country with a combination of traditional hotels, B&Bs, apart-hotels, and (maybe) a couple of Airbnb stays, but before reserving those my next step is looking at inter-city transportation. There’s no point in locking down a place to stay in Auckland, for instance, without knowing which days of the week the train from Wellington runs north (nope, it’s not every day!).

So… trains, planes, ferries, and automobiles are my focus for the next couple of days, plus tourist visas. Our Australian and New Zealand documents are done, I’ve got a link saved to the Malaysia Digital Arrival Card, the app loaded for the UK ETA, and am keeping an eye on the progress of the European ETIAS, although since we’ll both be over 70 by the time we reach Poland, we’ll likely be exempt.

Some of my 154 journal pages are starting to look a lot less empty!