This past week has been busy with final preparations for the trip: booking ground transportation, planning fun excursions, restaurant reservations, etc. We’re getting excited! It’s hard to believe that we’ve been planning this trip for almost a year now…
One thing that makes our trip unique is that we booked using Round the World (RTW) tickets. Every major airline alliance offers these, and they can be an inexpensive way to visit many locations across different continents in a single trip. Booking a RTW ticket does have some associated restrictions, though:
- Must fly continuously in one direction around the world (East or West; we chose East)
- Limited number of stops (six, in our case)
- Can only fly on partner airlines (we’re on Delta’s SkyTeam)
We also imposed our own rule when selecting stops: neither of us could have visited before.
With those guidelines in mind, we had a long discussion about the places we wanted to include in our trip agenda. This proved quite challenging! As it turns out, we both love to explore and have big backlogs for places we hope to see in our lifetimes. We also agreed that, given our limited vacation days, it made the most sense to stick to the major carrier routes (direct flights) to limit transit time (more hours in the air = less time exploring).
We had to make compromises, but there’s always our next RTW adventure! Right? In the end, we picked a set of locations that would afford us a diverse set of experiences: old world and new world; bustling cities and serene beaches; familiar places and exotic locales.
A week from today, we will depart JFK for our first destination… Prague!
-Two for Takeoff
