Complicated scenario but we normally live in LA, I'm flying to UK in September with two small children. Want to book a ticket London-Seoul-Japan-LA (preferably stopping there but if its cheaper to book leg back to London no problem as ill be back next year)
Thought about trail finders but they do phone calls from what I can work out, any other ideas for companies/websites I could try?
Thanks!
oneworld or STA travel do rtw tickets or you could book direct with star alliance?
the good news is your route is fairly standard si that will keep fare costs down but i would look at how much single ticket prices to each destination add up to too, just to compare.
Why would you not book LA to LA? You are starting from LA, not London. In either case, there is no problem finding places to get a price. Look online, talk to a travel agency, just like you would for any other trip. Why would trail finders taking phone calls be a problem? If it's the cost of the call, do you know what Skype is?
You can probably beat a true RTW fare by buying point-to-point, but it also might depend on the age of the kids. Kids under 12 receive a 25% discount on Oneworld Explorer RTW tickets - go to http://www.oneworld.com and follow the links to the online booking engine.
Alliance-based RTWs are priced differently depending on where they're purchased. At present the UK is much cheaper as an origin/destination point than the USA, so if this is an annual thing, it would be good to start the "cycle" in the UK. RTW tickets are good for a year.
The base price for a 3-continent/16-flight Oneworld Explorer sold and started in the UK is around US$2580 plus taxes and fees. A quick back-of-the-envelope investigation of LHR-ICN-TYO-LAX-LHR using one-way fares came pretty close to that, but fares are quite dependent on the dates traveled so not knowing your dates this is a stab in the dark. Most likely the "taxes and fees" would add another several hundred dollars to the total for the RTW, but that price will be fixed for a year, whereas the point-to-points can fluctuate all over the place.
The RTW's real advantage in this scenario is that 16 flights are included, of which up to six can be within North America. So assuming the Korea and Japan stops are both to be done in rapid succession, with no time for additional touring in Asia, but also assuming that your "stopover" in LA is for a longer period of time, before you "return" to the UK, then you could use the North America flight allowance for any other personal or work-related travel in the interim.
For example, say you fly from Japan to LA to go home. But before you return later in the year to the UK, you could use the North America allotment to travel to, say, Alaska, or the Caribbean, or Central America, or New York, or... you get it. ("North America" includes the US, Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and all of Central America.)
So in that sense, the additional initial cost of the RTW has now potentially turned into quite a bargain. Instead of four flights for $2600+ or an average of $650+ per flight, you've gotten, say, 10 flights for the same price, including 3 intercontinental flights at $260 each, so much better leverage. You can amend the itinerary in an RTW for a small change fee ($125 in most cases) and change dates at no charge, so they're not as "inflexible" as many people feel.
It really comes down to your personal travel patterns. RTWs can be cost-inefficient, or they can be spectacularly cost-efficient, depending on how they're used.
That's really helpful and really useful, thank you....especially as we're also mid planning trips to Toronto and Mexico at some point in 2014
Trip would start in London rather than LA because that's the flight pattern we're on - it was cheaper to buy a return ticket when we emigrated than a single so our tickets are now LHR-LAX-LHR, wouldn't matter drastically if I lost this next flight and started over from LAX but seems silly to waste the ticket if we can use it
Ahhhh, you have an existing ticket. Now it's making more sense. LOL The more relevant info you give effieloy the more relevant responses can be.
Gardyloo2's suggestion makes sense to me. I don't know if you could include both Canada and Mexico in the routing though. For example, LA to Vancouver (visit for a few days) to Calgary (visit Banff and the Rockies) to Toronto (visit) to London though should be a feasible route I would think and the cost of doing that separately would be considerable.
As Gardy notes, you would have to plug in the route and dates to start with and could then change the dates at no charge later if necessary.
I also agree that it is worthwhile keeping the 'starting point' in the UK for cheaper prices if you intend to continue the cycle. We travel to Scotland frequently (my wife's home country) from Canada and invariably it is cheaper for her sister to fly to Canada and back than for us to fly to Glasgow and back. I don't know what airline or prices you are using from London to LA but here in Canada Air Transat has the cheapest prices trans Atlantic.
Here's a sample route using Oneworld's Global Explorer RTW product (which allows using Alaska Airlines) that would work for you. It's a different product than the one I mentioned earlier, but around the same price.
Http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lhr-icn-nrt-lax-mex-lax-yyz-ord-lax-lhr
Intersting gardyloo2. I didn't know you could backtrack like that on a RTW ticket. Your route is doing LA to MEX back to LA then LA to Toronto back to LA then LA to London. I thought you had to keep moving in one direction ie. east or west.
Intersting gardyloo2. I didn't know you could backtrack like that on a RTW ticket. Your route is doing LA to MEX back to LA then LA to Toronto back to LA then LA to London. I thought you had to keep moving in one direction ie. east or west.
The requirement for east to west or west to east is between TC regions and/or continents, not within them. With alliance RTWs you have to cross both the Atlantic and the Pacific (and the Indian if applicable) in the same direction.
With the Oneworld products the restrictions within continents are fairly few, for example only one transcontinental nonstop in North America (in the above case LAX-YYZ) and in Europe only two flights between LHR and various Eastern Europe/Middle Eastern cities, such as ATH, TLV, DXB etc.
For example, here's a 4-continent route (or something like it - memory isn't 100%) that I took a couple of years ago. You can see how the zigzags worked in Europe, N. America and Asia. (Pasting URL 'cause the TT seems to have a bug on html links - just cut and paste the following if it doesn't hyperlink.
Illuminating.
I am not a fan of pre-booking anything so it is not something I would ever use but it's interesting. Now if someone could just invent a site that tells me how much time I will need in X to see/do what interests me, it would be of some use to me.
Have you ever wondered how someone who has never been to a place can figure out how long they will want to stay there? I go, I stay, I leave when I am ready to leave and not before. Seems to work out to exactly the right number of days in a place every time. ;-)