Round the World Trip (Part 1) - Introduction

Back in 2002 we looked into booking a flight on the Concorde but discovered that it was extremely expensive. Later we heard about folks flying around the world and we discovered that if we book a round-the-world (RTW) trip with the OneWorld alliance, we could add a flight on the Concorde between New York and London for an additional $1,800 and that seemed a lot more reasonable. The product is called the OneWorld Explorer and basically you just select from the following choices and then you get to pick your own route (subject to some restrictions):
  • Number of "continents" that you want to visit ("continents" being defined in a slightly odd fashion)
  • Class of service you'd like to fly - economy vs. business vs. first
  • Whether you want to fly on the Concorde between Europe and N. America
Within each continent you can choose up to 4 flights before continuing on to the next continent (IOW, you can visit up to 5 cities on each continent). There are restrictions that apply to the route you take, but the only main thing is that you have to fly one of the airlines in the OneWorld alliance.

Originally we wanted to visit South America and Africa but because the airlines in the alliance don't have the best coverage on those continents we opted for a 5-continent first-class trip: North America, Europe (which includes Egypt), Asia, and Australia / New Zealand.

RTW trips can be approached in different ways - some folks take a year or more to go around the world, others go to a few places and stay in each for quite a while, but we decided to opt for a different approach - use the maximum allowed number of flights within each continent and break up the trip into two phases. In the first phase (which took place in August - September 2003) we covered Europe and Egypt, and in the second phase (February - March 2004) we'll cover Europe and Asia / Australia / NZ.

In case you're curious about the actual cost of the trip, as far as airfare it came to about $9,300 - not bad for a first class trip around the world, visiting 5 continents and flying on the Concorde!


Next - New York

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