Round the world air ticket - any ideas?
 

Hello,

We have figured out that to complete our trip of driving UK-OZ we need to fly ourselves:

India - Malaysia
Singapore - Australia
Australia - UK

And this to me looks like a round the world air ticket. From memory I seem to remember that these aren't sold unless you start in the UK or similar.

We have emailed STA travel and BA, and are awaiting answers, but I thought we would ask here if anyone has any ideas.

Thanks in advance

Cheers

Hey. It will be ages when STA get back to you. Did you use their online map to construct a flight? You could also try gapyear.com?

You can certainly buy them in the US, not sure about other places. But most of the ones that I looked at required more "hops" than you are making--ie, you had to have at least five flights (I think), you couldn't go around the world in two stops. Maybe there are some RTW tix without this requirement.

Hey Ollie,

There are a few options out there, some cobbled togther by smaller airlines and some put together by the big guys. For a good overview, do a search on the ones offered by the major alliances (Star Alliance, OneWorld) and from that you can do a quick calculation to see if it is worth it. There are many places to start and stop, not just UK or US, but that depends on from whom you are buying the ticket. Hope that helps.

Hi there,

I would suggest individual flights, for instance the leg from India to Malaysia and Singapore to Australia could be taken on budget airlines such as Air Asia or Tiger.

Also the return leg from Oz to UK could be via budget for instance Air Asia from Oz to Malaysia and then from Malaysia to UK. Air Asia often have very good deals if you book and pay six months ahead of flight. At the moment you can book Oz to Malaysia one way for about 100 pounds.

Hope this information helps. If you end up in Thailand on your travels email us and we could meet up.

Joyce [UK now in Thai]

Hi,

If it was me I would also go with individual flights. Having a RTW ticket ties you to an itinerary which you might want to change at a later date. You might be able to change dates (for a price?) with a RTW but can you change airports?

For example, are you sure you want to fly direct from Singapore to Aus, or might you want to spend some time in Indonesia? Personally I would much prefer spending time in Indonesia over Singapore, but that's just me.

And I hate itineraries. I bought a half way RTW ticket once (UK - Aus) thinking before I set off that it was the best option but ended up not using half of it as I wanted to stay places longer than the ticket allowed.

So I guess it depends how you're travelling. If you're fixed on dates / places and that's not going to change then RTW might be good, but otherwise I would go with individual flights.

I think you can probably buy RTW tickets just about anywhere. I've bought them several times over a period of 23 years in Australia.

However I've found some airline websites are not very user-friendly re RTW, so I went to Flight Centre, told them where I wanted to go, and let them sort out the best deal.

I'm hopefully going to be in the same boat (or plane) next year.

asiatravel.com have flights from India (Chennai to Kuala Lumpur) for as low as £40 one way.

jetstar.com have flights from Singapore to Australia (Perth) also for £40 one way.

You should then have loads to choose from to get back to the UK.

Good site with much information: Air Passes