In my last article, I mentioned that I had a really good reason for wanting to be in business class for my trip to Bogota.
Well, the reason was I had to be in Singapore immediately after this trip and I was going to fly the long way around!
In the space of 4 weeks, I took 11 flights:
- London to Amsterdam
- Amsterdam to Panama
- Panama to Bogota
- Bogota to Paris
- Paris to London
- London to Singapore
- Singapore to Kuala Lumpur
- Kuala Lumpur to Singapore
- Singapore to Tokyo
- Tokyo to Singapore
- Singapore to London
Investigating a round the world ticket
To do all of these flights, I did investigate the “Round the World” ticket option.
This ticket allows you to fly around the world, stopping in many locations, as long as you are constantly travelling in the same direction. This ticket is not cheap!
Unfortunately, whilst they would have sold me a ticket, it was prohibitively expensive. For this trip, the ticket would have looked like this:
London, Madrid, Bogota, San Francisco, Singapore, London. It would have only used One World Airlines.
This was in 2017 and flight pricing was quite different then. If I remember correctly, booking 2 return trips was cheaper than booking the round-the-world trip by around £1000.
However, I want to give you up-to-date information, so I did some research for a similar trip to go in March 2023, (the time of getting quotes was July 2022), flying in economy only this time, not Premium Economy, here’s my results:
Round the World Trip: London, Bogota, San Francisco, Singapore, London. £2732
Two return trips, London – Bogota and London to Singapore. £2067
I think the price gap has reduced a little since 2017, but flight prices currently are fluctuating all over the place, so it’s always worth doing your research.
Booking a round the world ticket
How do I book a round-the-world ticket?
Since you will be relying on multiple airlines, the best way to research your trip is to use the alliance websites, rather than the airlines:
Both One World and Star Alliance have dedicated round-the-world booking tools where you put in your chosen cities, and it proposes possible routes for you and gives you an option to book from the most suitable airline.
Closing words
Ultimately, round-the-world tickets are usually quite expensive. The reason for this is simple – they’re not targeted at people doing multiple stops on a business trip. Rather, they are designed for people who really are doing a round-the-world experience and want a simplified booking experience.
That being said, checking round-the-world ticket prices when doing a complex, multi-stop trip is recommended.
