Steven and Michelle Around The World

More preparation and a new camera

2009-06-03T00:00:00-04:00

More preparation and a new camera

03 June 2009 – Jonesboro, GA

We recently finished a trip to Las Vegas to see some family. For such a short trip – we were gone about a week – our backpacks were amazingly stuffed. We purposely packed as if we were going abroad, which meant taking a couple quart-sized bags stuffed with 3oz containers of fluid. We tried to prioritize: is it more important to have two travel-size contact solution bottles or one bottle and another of sunscreen lotion?

When we tried to pack up for our return trip, we realized that our bags were even harder to fill. Everyone knows this, but it’s easy to forget. Dirty clothes and haste make a bag 5-10% larger by volume, which makes packing annoying. This is something we’re going to take into account for our trip abroad, as we’ll essentially be re-packing almost every morning while we’re away. We need to be fast, keeping the process as painless as possible.

We took a day-trip out to Augusta from Atlanta, one of the most boring drives you can make. It was especially boring for me for a couple reasons: one was that I was suffering some sort of headache after a night of nausea, and another was that the landscape surrounding Las Vegas, which we had just seen, was a hundred times more variable and interesting than the walled-in, straight-line drive down I-20.

While in Augusta, we looked at a few rental homes and apartments. We found one we like, and we’re hoping the landlord didn’t screw up with thinking that the current tenants are leaving soon.

We also ordered a new camera for our trip. We’ve always taken two cameras on our vacations, usually our current camera and the one it replaced, which usually works fine besides being older and slower. Our trip hiking the Inca Trail taught us the importance of battery life, and we missed taking as many shots of Machu Picchu as we wanted.

We opted for a AA battery-powered camera as our co-camera this time. The Canon PowerShot A470 had great reviews, is rated at 7.1MP with a 3.4x optical zoom, and it takes two AA batteries, which we have plenty of. We can probably buy more abroad if we need to.

We hope it’s the perfect travel camera. We picked up a large box of AA batteries at IKEA a few months ago, and Target often has packs of AA’s for $1.

Preparation and swine flu concerns

2009-05-14T00:00:00-04:00

Preparation and swine flu concerns

14 May 2009 – Atlanta

Tomorrow is our last day of work. We’ve used the last few weeks to make sure we’re up to date on immunizations, general physicals, and dental exams. We’ll have the option to elect COBRA coverage over the next 60 days, and we’re hoping to minimize or eliminate any period of time without insurance. In the fall we’ll rely on the insurance Michelle obtains through medical school.

Things have been relatively quiet trip-wise. Since we finished buying our tickets we’ve relaxed a little, and let ourselves get caught up with the more immediate concern of moving out of the apartment. We still need to book some rooms in some of our destinations, and we should have a little time next week to work on that. Not having a full time job frees you that way.

The thing that was most disconcerting recently was the swine flu outbreak. We purchased our tickets such that any “cancel for any reason” flight insurance couldn’t be obtained within the allowable dates. Nor could we contact Expedia and re-elect the flight insurance options on our legs. The news reports were talking of the possibility of flight cancellations, and I worried that just one snag like that could throw the trip off in a bad way. Not to mention the news of various passengers being held in quarantine upon arrival at their destinations.

From what we read on the CDC site as the swine flu was making headlines, swine flu didn’t seem bad. We did, however, worry about getting it while abroad, without normal insurance and health care facilities. We’ll be spending many hours in the close quarters of airline cabins, and many more roaming airports and busy streets.

Thankfully, swine flu hasn’t gone completely pandemic. It’s following the normal seasonal flu pattern and ebbing during the summer months. We should be fine, but this out-of-the-blue issue highlights some things you should consider when planning a trip around the world.

Buying tickets for a round the world trip on our own

2009-04-16T00:00:00-04:00

Buying tickets for a round the world trip on our own

16 Apr 2009 – Atlanta

Our patience had expired. After dealing with the airlines’ RTW desks for several fruitless hours we were eager to start searching for tickets on our own. We were fairly confident that we could buy tickets to each of the destinations we wanted to visit for less than an official RTW ticket would cost, even factoring in something fairly exotic such as flying to another country and picking up our RTW tickets at that location.

As stated in the previous post, an RTW ticket that included our destinations would cost around $4,000. If we started in London and could manage to stay under 29,000 miles on the SkyTeam plan, tickets would cost about $2,950. We’d have to buy a ticket from Atlanta to London on our own, and that would add about $400-500 for each of us, bringing the total price to $3,350, plus whatever a local agent added to the price for booking it for us. Due to the way SkyTeam had to route their flights, we couldn’t actually achieve our itinerary on anything less than the 34,000 mile plan, which was one of the reasons we opted to look for tickets on our own. Starting the journey in London on the 34,000 mile plan would cost about $4,000 plus the cost of the ticket to get us to London.

Around the time of this writing, Continental Airlines has left the SkyTeam alliance in favor of the Star Alliance, so I’m not sure how that will change things over time.

We bought our tickets over the course of a couple weeks. We did most of the purchasing early in the week, usually late at night. This was partly because those times were convenient, but also because some people advise certain times for buying tickets.

We watched our fares and noted price fluctuations. Once a price had dropped, or at least remained at the level it was when we first started looking, we would open up a few search sites and compare prices. There were sometimes slight variations in price for the same flights, so we’d pick the cheapest (it seemed like Expedia was often a good choice) and make the purchase. Ultimately, we figured that if we could beat the RTW fares we were doing well.

We just recently confirmed the last set of tickets, and our grand total sits at $3,198 per person.

It’s a lot of money, but it gets us around the world, beats the RTW options the alliances have, and we had the freedom to choose from the best flights, regardless of carrier. The amount of time we will spend waiting in airports has been reduced by 6-12 hours due to having better flights to choose from, so this is one of those situations where buying tickets on your own is a better option than buying an RTW ticket.

The only tickets we didn’t actually buy on our own were those on Vietnam Airlines. We used Buffalo Tours to buy our tickets and saved some money. Our searches showed Siem Reap – Hanoi costing $307, but we were able to get that leg for $238. Likewise, Hanoi – Japan was $580 when we searched for it, but the company bought it for $430.

Buying a RTW ticket (or why I hate calling the airlines)

2009-03-29T00:00:00-04:00

Buying a RTW ticket (or why I hate calling the airlines)

29 Mar 2009 – Atlanta

We initially planned on visiting Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. After looking around more, we decided to add Athens, Cairo, and Delhi to our list.

At first we thought buying a Round the World (RTW) ticket from on of the three main airline alliances would be the best way to get around the world. The prices seemed reasonable and it seemed it would be easier to add less accessible destinations (we thought about getting to Easter Island or Seychelles) for little overhead.

If you’re looking for a RTW ticket, you’ll typically start by browsing the main alliances: Star Alliance, One World, and Sky Team.

Early on, we really liked the fact that the One World Alliance offered the oneworld Itinerary planner, an advanced Flash site that lets you plan and book your trip. I hope this is where the others are headed.

We ended up calling Star Alliance because they have so many alliance members and seemed to offer good coverage for the areas we wanted to visit. After some waiting and call routing, we spoke with an agent at United. She told us the base price for the trip we wanted was $2,600. Michelle spent a lot of time dictating our itinerary and we were told someone at the rates desk would get back to us the following day with an adjusted price (ie, airport-specific taxes and fees for all of our destinations).

We didn’t receive a call the next day and so called that night after work. The agent said there was an error and sent it back to the rate desk. We received an itinerary by mail in the meantime, but quickly noticed that the agent entered one of the dates incorrectly. We called back to get that fixed and reached yet another agent. At this time we were told by another agent (there are no direct lines to anyone – I asked plainly -, so you’ll speak to a different person every time you call) that we didn’t qualify for the $2,600 base price. Rather, our trip would start at about $4,657 + taxes/fees.

Read the full summary of this RTW booking incident at my main site.

We were irate. Michelle bore most of it actually, as she had spent the previous nights hunched over her desk repeating basic stuff to someone on the other end. The Sky Team Alliance prices started at about the same price, so we thought we’d give them a try. We had avoided them thinking Star Alliance had them handily beat.

I called Delta the next night and spent over 2 hours on the phone dictating a route we had planned. We used Kayak and Orbitz when Sky Team’s timetables showed no results. You can filter results by alliance at Orbitz.

The woman I was talking to was nice, but it would take her a few minutes to enter flight details and pull up available routes. At the start of the call I told her we would be in London and wanted to start our RTW trip from there. By the end, after 2 long hours, she said I could only start in London if my credit card had a London billing address. The flights she had picked would be available for 72 hours for the US price of $3,969 (plus a few other fees she couldn’t tell me until she actually ran the numbers at the time of payment).

We had read that it wasn’t a problem to start anywhere in the world on some other sites, so this was a little surprising. Starting in London, even with buying our own ticket from Atlanta to London to get started, would have been about $1000 cheaper in total. Another alternative would have been to call a London-based travel agent and have them buy the tickets for us.

Michelle remembered that STA Travel also had a Round-the-World planning service. Their online rtw planning tool is pretty nice and shows you one thing none of the others do: what other destinations can be reached from a given location.

Working with STA Travel can be done online via email. Michelle received a quote for about $4,302, which was in line with the other quotes. They were easy to work with and had a quote to us within 24 hours.

In the end, we decided to find our own routing. Many of the choices made available by Star Alliance involved long layovers (for example, there was a 21 hour layover in a Chinese airport when going from Delhi to Phnom Penh). The next post will discuss how we found and purchased our flights.