Travel Bugs

Several friends have asked us how we went about booking our flights for our trip last year. Well here is the story.

Before we flew out of LAX bound for Argentina over 1 year ago, Blair and I did a bit of legwork trying to determine how we wanted to get from place to place on this trip. Lots of friends recommended looking at Round the World (RTW) tickets, so we priced out a few options. Student Travel Agency (STA), who offers trips to not only students, but geezers like us, gave a quote for our first itinerary, which was actually quite different from what we ended up booking.

STA quoted us at around $4000 each for the following:

Los Angeles to New Zealand – 1 Dec
New Zealand to Australia – 2 Mar
Australia to SE Asia – 13 Apr
SE Asia to South Africa – 8 Jun
South Africa to Kenya – 13 Jul
Kenya to Spain – 7 Sep
Spain to Argentina – 5 Oct
Argentina to Los Angeles – 4 jan

We priced out individual tickets on Orbitz (I think) for the same itinerary and it was about 20% less than STA’s quote. Why use an agency if they aren’t providing some kind of savings? Perhaps this is why online ticketing is so prevalent these days. We looked at another online tool, Qantas’s RTW ticket. Their automated system coughed out pretty much the same price as STA. The problem with Qantas’s pricing was that it was largely based on the number of continents being traveled to. Including our home continent of North America we would be hitting 5 continents: North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Blair investigated Airtreks, which seemed like a viable option, but by the time we found Airtreks we were already leaning towards DIY.

We really had trouble leading up to our trip finding an option where we could book our flights all at once to save money. In the end we decided to buy the tickets as we traveled. It’s a good thing, too, because our itinerary ended up being very different than the one above. We ended up going in the opposite direction! The final price for our exact itinerary without flight points was …<drum roll>… $3277/person. Here’s how it worked out for us in a pay-as-you-go style:

Los Angeles – Buenos Aires $372
Buenos Aires – El Calafate (internal) $249
Buenos Aires – Cape Town $521
Johannesburg – Durban (internal) $47 *side story about this
Johannesburg – Bangkok $443
Luang Prabang – Hanoi $130
Hanoi – Bangkok $83
Bangkok – Melbourne $337 + $127 change fee for the two of us
Melbourne – Christchurch $205
Auckland – Los Angeles $890

Total airfare one person: $3277 x 2 of us = $6554
minus our flight points of $815
plus a flight change to Melbourne $127
gives us our grand total of $5866 (so in our case $2933 per person)

We were glad in the end that planning the trip ourselves both saved us a ton of money and also gave us the flexibility to choose our route as we went. To be honest, before digging up the STA emails for this post, I had forgotten how much our itinerary had changed. We started to seriously plan our route in the summer of 2009. But by the time December 2009 arrived, we had changed the direction entirely. Our starting country of New Zealand had become our finishing country and vice versa for Argentina. The time frames where entirely different. Countries were cut out entirely. I’m not sure what this would have cost us if we had gone with STA or the Qantas planner. I do know that we would have stuck to the original itinerary to avoid fees and, consequently, we would have felt like we had our hands tied.

Our flights were a mix of well-planned legs and more spontaneous ones. Flights within SE Asia were booked with short notice, a few days to a week in advance, adding to the cost a bit. Melbourne was added as a 5 day stopover, adding around $250 to the final cost of getting from Bangkok to Chirstchurch. Most of the international flights were booked well in advance with the aid of Kayak, a handy flight search website. We were able to set up email alerts to keep us from constantly searching for flights. Once a flight hit a certain price, we would receive an email and usually we purchased the ticket that day.

*The South African flight from Johannesburg to Durban was the one nightmare. We waited until January 2010 to book that flight, which was nearly 6 months in advance. I had seen the prices for this flight back in November 2009 and they were running around $30/each. Waiting ended up killing us. By January they had rocketed to $300 due to World Cup demand and shady airlines charging outlandish prices. Through methods (read: “by accident … sort of”) I’ll not publish on the web, we were able to get the tickets at a very steep discount, close to the original price of the tickets before World Cup greediness grasped the airlines in South Africa.

Blair and I are very accustomed to booking our own travel and so our planning method came very natural to us. Websites are constantly making it easier to book the way we did. In the end, we didn’t have to spend much of our time thinking about how we’d get from place to place. And in general I think it’s a stretch to think you can book everything at once an have your flights booked before you leave on a trip like this. Dates and destinations almost always change. Booking legs ourselves, a few weeks to a few months in advance, was the best way for us to deal with these changes.

Ron, Blair’s Dad, snapped a shot of us outside of LAX baggage claim, returning home: