Wine gives you wings! (or helps you buy them online)

Who said that buying a round-the-world ticket was easy? I’ve just spent the last hour trying to get the LD (or low down…for all of you 90′s spawn) on the various groups offering RTW tickets. There seem to be an infinite number of factors to consider: Which airlines? Where do they fly? Flexibility? Number of transfers allowed? Number of stop-overs allowed? Minimum number of continents to visit? Taxes? Length of validity? Price? Inclusions?

It’s enough to make anyone reach for the wine bottle!

Have you ever noticed that the fine print is the most ridiculous thing ever invented? Seriously. I’ll be reading, with intensity, and suddenly notice that the text has been decorated with tiny little stars and numbers. “What is this?”, I think to myself. Could this be some sort of text feng shui at work? No! It is a polite indication that I have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, possibly link through three more pages, and find a long, uniform, block of text that I can only assume is thoroughly relevant and still completely and utterly impossible to understand. How consumer friendly.

I wonder who decided that this was the BEST way to tell customers…”Hey! We’re about to screw you over!”
Are there airline office staff just sitting around going: “Well, keeping the text teeny-tiny will stop people from noticing that they are about to sacrifice their third child and household pet to get this great flight deal!”

Anyway, against my better judgement, I choose to ignore the fine print…for now (you win, airline office staff!). Hoping for an easier way to compare RTW flights, I move onto the ever-present FAQ section.

Frequently Asked Questions. Somewhat helpful, but not always. It is in this section that I discover that all three carriers I have decided to survey (STA, One World, and Star Alliance) have a maximum ticket validity of 12 months. There is not even a pay-for-longer-validity option. This means that because I have decided to spread my trip out over 17 months, I will not be eligible for a ticket…although I will not be taking any more or any less flights than I would have been if I squished my trip into 365 days.

In addition, I’m not allowed to have more than 14 stop overs (ie: only 2 in the home country – 1 leaving and 1 returning, 4 or 5 on each continent). Even worse, one of the tickets is mileage based and actually counts overland travel towards your flight mileage. This means that an individual planning overland travel (like…myself), would have to pay for each mile that he/she traveled while not on the airplane.

Despite all of this mumbo jumbo (I tried to make sense of all the rules…and let me tell you, it’s bloody hard!), I was still super excited because one of my favorite travel sites STA seemed to be immune to all of Airline RRS (rules and regulations shit!). That was…until I got the email. The email, from an otherwise very pleasant STA employee, informing me that I would need to give him all of my travel dates and destinations again (reason: the website is fickle) and reminded me that my online price quote was not (in fact) accurate. Why, STA, why? You guys were like the golden child until now! You could do no wrong!

Anyway, although it sounds like I’m between a rock and a hard place, all hope is not lost.

What ticket could I possibly have in the future? Maybe a series of one-way tickets, booked as I go. Alternatively, two separate RTW tickets covering the two large segments of my trip.

Where does this put me right now? Still without one RTW ticket, but with a nice glass of wine (and most of a bottle left to go!).