They cancelled my first world tour
My first world tour, a 700 euro ticket was supposed to take me to 4 continents
Lufthansa
Star Alliance
The world tour is the holy grail of travelers, of course it is one of those experiences that you plan carefully, study itineraries for months, and eventually go crazy to peel off the coveted ticket.
In this article:
Having made this necessary premise, I say that in my case it was none of these things, quite the contrary.
Before going into the details of my itinerary let's explain well, for the uninitiated, what it means to go around the world.
The rules of the world tour
If you want to buy one ticket that contains all the routes, the rules are very simple:
You choose one of the 3 alliances (Skyteam, One World and Star Alliance) on their respective sites there is a section that allows you to design your itinerary by choosing dates, airports and airlines.
You should never turn back from the latitude of the airport from which you take off., you go from east to west or vice versa.
So one may decide to visit the world starting from Milan Dubai and Bali, but from Bali one will not be able to fly to Singapore, because one would return westward, while our journey must always continue, in this case, eastward.
Tickets are sold, normally, at a cost that varies according to the number of stopovers and how many miles you travel and according to the class of travel.
Then there is the possibility of buying untied tickets from each other, mixing companies and routes, going back and forth as you see fit. However, there are two major drawbacks, either you buy a lot of round-trip tickets and then never use the return, or you will have to buy one-way tickets, which for these routes are not cheap at all. An example? The same flight from Hawaii that will take me back to London bought on the same day costs over €3,000.
If price is not an issue the fact remains that "untied" reservations do not guarantee in case of inconvenience, a delayed plane that causes a connecting flight to be missed would blow a chunk of the trip forcing the purchase of a new ticket.
Traveling to the east, we also go back in time
In the days of Concorde it was possible to take off from London at 9 a.m. and land in New York at 8 a.m., miracles of supersonic speed. Today the only time machine is one that allows you to fly from Oceania to Hawaii and land, watch in hand, 12 hours before you are airborne.
This is what is going to happen in my "around the world," and here I could have shortened my trip by a day, making this journey even more memorable, but Hawaii-for those who grew up playing Hotel and watching Magnum PI-has a different meaning and is worth a stop over, not least because it will always be Jan. 4.
How I booked a ticket for less than 1,000 euros to go around the world
Like many of the crazy things one does in life, it was not my intention to book such an itinerary, but one has to know how to take chances.
I get a couple of notifications about the presence of this incredible offer, the first thing I think is, "I don't feel like banging around even though £700 seemed more like an error fare than a round-the-world price."
The fare rules stipulated that the trip had to be completed within one month after the first take-off, let's say that for such an adventure 20 days is the minimum, if you are aiming for 4 or 5 stops and want to make more stops, 30 days is necessary.
I start looking and making a couple of attempts and I notice the great availability around the end of March 2021, but having already 3 weeks in Australia planned with my family in April, I don't feel comfortable attacking two such stressful trips in less than 2 months.
I decide to focus my search on the first few days of January and amazingly I find places with an even more attractive fare, £550. I try to narrow down the dates as much as possible and compress the trip into "only" 5 days; if I wanted, I could have taken it down to 4, but let's not go overboard....
I end up with a "crazy" itinerary; departure January 2 from London to Tokyo, with a stopover in Frankfurt. I would then have been able to travel once again on one of the few Jumbos still in operation, the 747/800 the last queen of Lufthana's skies. The following day from Tokyo I was to depart on ANA's 787 "Dreamliner" to Sydney. Half a day to have a beer and off on a Hawaian A330 that was to take me to Honolulu.
Here, yes, in Hawaii I would sleep in a bed, after a dip in the Pacific and a cocktail while watching the sunset. The next morning I would leave for London again, not before stopping in San Francisco, just long enough to enjoy a lobster sandwich while looking at the Golden Gate before United's 777 would take me back to the British capital, where I would land on January 6, four days after taking off.
Pros and cons of this madness
Since it was not a sightseeing trip, but an adventure trip the fact that I would not see the places I did not consider it a cons, so in the end the only downside was that, unless upgraded, the trip would be entirely in economy.
The pros were plenty. I would have been able to test 4 different airlines, 6 different aircraft models and as many airports, dozens of lounges and a hotel. I would have made about 23,000 qualifying miles to renew my status with Star Alliance Gold.
Sure, in economy you don't get as many miles as in business or first, but it's still a lot for a ticket that ended up costing only 730 euros, all inclusive. I would have loaded everything onto my card TAP Portugal and taking advantage of the Gold status I could have enjoyed all the privileges accorded to Star Alliance Gold status, because it's okay to travel in economy but at least on the ground it's nice to be an Elite passenger.
I have rescheduled the whole trip in 2021, exactly in August, in the hope that this time we will be able to leave
