138 days to go around the world!
A 138-day trip around the world takes a LOT of planning. Where are we going to go? What are we going to do when we get there? Where are we going to stay? How are we getting around? What clothes do we need? Do we need visas? Vaccinations? Insurance? Who is going to look after our house, our diabetic cat, our yard while we are gone? So, it’s a good thing I started this process a long time ago.
I actually started with the last question first. Last June, when we retired and our son, Ian, was on his way back from several months in Guatemala, I asked him to commit to being here while we took a turn traveling. Once that was settled, I felt free to go ahead with making concrete plans for our trip.
I had heard about round-the-world (RTW) airline tickets in the past and thought I’d look into them. I googled “round the world airline tickets” and, voila! A couple of travel blogs popped up explaining how to buy them and some resources to help. There is a very cool website – AirTreks.com – with an interactive map where you can play with destinations. You can add and delete and move them around as much as you like and it will give you an estimated price.
One thing I liked about this site is that I didn’t have to give them any contact information to use the map, and no one was trying to chat with us or pressure us into making any decisions. However, once we had a tentative plan in place, we submitted our information for a free quote from an expert Travel Planner. Once we did that, their service was very quick and very efficient. We had an email message within five minutes telling us who our expert travel planner was – Aurelie – and within another five minutes, we had a message from her telling us how happy she was to be our expert travel planner and to please use her online calendar to make an appointment for an hour-long phone conversation about our trip. The appointment was for the very next day.
Aurelie was really sweet and helpful. She had done a RTW trip herself a few years before, had lived in Thailand for a year, and is now living in Spain. Her suggestions and experience were invaluable and she got pretty excited about our trip as well. After that conversation, Aurelie got back to us the next day with a more refined itinerary and estimated price.
I know there are other sites that help plan RTW trips and they may be good as well. All I know, is that AirTreks has been fantastic and I highly recommend them. Aurelie spent another two and half hours on the phone with us discussing layovers and connections and making all the bookings. She and her colleagues have provided more specific information about some of our destinations that helped us plan the details and they have continued to be in touch to pass on scheduling changes that the airlines make. They also emphasize that they are available throughout the trip to help with last minute snags such as missed connections.
So, by mid-July, we had a house-sitter, we had our airline tickets, and we knew where we were going. Next episode – Filling in the Details: where are we going to stay, what are we going to do, how are we getting around, etc., etc.
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