We’ve finally been able to create a route that takes us to the places we want to go and complies with the regulations for the OneWorld alliance round the world air ticket. Whilst we are disappointed not to be travelling the Silk Road, reclaiming those 10 weeks allows us to visit Borneo, Bali, Galapagos Islands and Namibia, so all in all we are not too disappointed. Our new itinerary is now:
As an aside – we did investigate alternatives to OneWorld for the RTW ticket – single airline tickets don’t have the coverage and the Star Alliance network is very weak in South America (going from Santiago to Auckland would have involved travelling through the US and Australia). It looks like we are settled on OneWorld
From the table above, you can see that we still haven’t made the East / Westbound decision yet, though we are leaning west so to speak – we quite like the idea of kicking off our trip with a cycling tour of (parts of) Cuba. Other than which direction to head in, the major unknowns that we have are:
- Which Pacific Islands will we do? The assumption is that we will fly to Auckland and then do a circular trip to one or more islands before returning to Auckland and heading on. (Stopping off as we go across the Pacific doesn’t seem to work with the OneWorld ticket).
- Where in Borneo to go? At the minute our map just has a pin in the middle of Borneo. More research needed!
- How best to get to the Galapagos Islands. At the minute our route takes us from Cancun to Lima from where we have assumed that we can fly to the Galapagos – Quito isn’t well served on OneWorld from Cancun.
I believe I travelled with the same ticket some years ago, but I do believe the one world explorer (the continent based ticket) and not the global explorer the milage based one. whicj one did you book ? I wish I had come accross this RTW tickets, I could have saved a chunk by choosing the right one, however I have no regrets.
I beleive the connection points between santiago chile and auckland allow you to stop off at tahiti and the easter island (on the flight path) within the RTW ticket.
Borneo – which side did you have planned – the malaysion or indonesian ? I know the orangatang santuary on the malaysian side is quite popular, went there some years ago.
Depending on the ticket you got, santiago is the flight hub for south america (LAN), so all flights will go via Santiago, so you probably will have burn one of your 4 flights on santiago, unless there is a budget flight from lima to equitos, or book a LAN flight from there.