How We Will Travel Round the World

It's time for another article in our Frugal Hedonist series, from my wife Mary. In this installment she reveals that the Round-The-World insanity isn't quite as insane as it appears. Continue reading below.

As our departure date grows closer, I've been getting lots of questions about taking a round-the-world trip. Of course we've been telling everyone we know, from family and friends to our wonderful dentist (hi, Dr. Yardumian!) about our plans for this 71-day journey. The first question almost everyone asks is, "how are you able to do that?" The second question is usually, "will you take me with you?"

Good questions. As to question two - if you can fit in a carry-on bag, you're welcome to tag along. As to the first question, we are incredibly fortunate in having a business that can, at least in theory, be managed from anywhere in the world... well, as long as there's high-speed Internet. We do have to stay in hotels that offer reliable Internet access, but that's about it.

We are also very lucky to have a wonderful sister-in-law who will be helping me out with MouseSavers.com by doing some of the daily updates and editing the newsletter. We have a terrific housesitter who adores our 96-pound Rottweiler. We have great neighbors who keep a watchful eye on things and even plow our driveway, just to be nice. We have a fantastic bookkeeper who will pay bills and make deposits for us. Without all of them, there's no way we'd be able to leave home for so long.

So it "takes a village" to go on a round-the-world trip.

The other thing I'm starting to realize is that a lot of people assume we're taking a cruise. Not so. In fact, we're using a round-the-world airline ticket called a Oneworld Explorer. This ticket allows us to travel on all of the airlines that are part of the Oneworld Alliance, which includes American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, JAL and Qantas, among others. We can make up to 20 stopovers on our way around the world.

You can buy a Oneworld Explorer ticket in Economy, Business or First Class. While the First Class version is not cheap, it's what you might call a relative bargain, because it's tremendously less expensive than buying First Class tickets separately. It would have cost us more to buy one round-trip to Sydney in First Class than to buy the entire Round-the-World ticket in First.

Anyway, we decided to splurge on the First Class version, both because of the sheer number of miles we'll be flying and because we have picked some long routes on airlines that are known for particularly excellent First Class service, such as Cathay Pacific and British Airways. Some shorter legs of the trip will be in Business Class, though, because certain routes don't offer First Class service.

We have chosen a 4-continent version of the Oneworld Explorer ticket (you can visit as few as 3 continents or as many as 6). Oneworld defines the continents a bit oddly - the Middle East is considered part of Europe, for instance - and it allows you to backtrack within a continent, but once you've left that continent, you can't go back.

Just figuring out how to use and maximize the Oneworld Explorer tickets was quite a task. The rules are confusing and arcane, but if you can master them, it's possible to get a huge amount of value out of these tickets. I have to give a shout out to the great people on the FlyerTalk.com Oneworld board at this point. They really helped me with this.

Among other things, that discussion board helped me to realize that by deliberately backtracking within continents, we could earn a lot of extra frequent flyer miles. For instance, we'll be leaving the "Southwest Pacific" continent (basically Australia/New Zealand) via Sydney and flying to London. Then we'll backtrack to Dubai, which is considered part of the "Europe" continent, and then return to London and fly to Madrid, etc. Now, we may regret all that flying - I'm sure it will be pretty exhausting - but at least we're doing it in style!

In the end, we'll have actually flown 55,121 miles, not counting separate side trips to Hawaii and Iceland, which are not part of the Round-the-World ticket. I've figured out that we'll get the most bonus miles by accruing the mileage in the Qantas Frequent Flyer program. With various bonuses (you earn extra miles for flying in Business or First Class, plus extra miles for achieving certain tiers within the program), we'll each end up with over 138,000 Qantas miles. That's enough miles to take a Business Class trip to London.

That's right. We're going to get another very nice "free" trip out of this experience!