J and I were up until almost 3am last night laying out a feasible itinerary for our highly anticipated Round-the-World (RTW) trip which is slated to begin later this year. For the past two weeks, we've been trying to figure out the most economical way to fly and live during our planned 8 months abroad. After considering multiple senarios which included various multi-stop fares, crazy nested round-trip itineraries and liberal uses of frequent flier miles, we may have settled on the OneWorld RTW fare. There's lots of restrictions, but the gist of it is that for a set price we get to travel to 4 continents, get 4 air segments within each continent, but can only use 16 air segments total (includes transfers), must travel in one direction (east to west, or west to east) and cannot backtrack between continents. With the aid of the interactive OneWorld Trip Planner, we finally figured out how to hit all of our desired destinations in the desired sequence during the desired seasons while taking into consideration all of their restrictions (see image below)! Lesson learned - China is a b*tch to navigate without losing segments to transfer!
