"How do RTW tickets work?"
There are many different companies that sell specific around the world air tickets. Each of the major air alliances offers a round-the-world ticket, all with wildly different flavors. There are also a number of consolidators that can put together tickets on the cheap. In general you can loop the earth for as little as $1,000 on upwards depending on how many stops you make (or how remote they are). How you go really comes down to cost and flexibility.
Airtreks — the best place to start building your dream trip. Air-treks is a consolidator providing very cheap tickets, with varying degrees of flexibility. The best part of the site is their trip-building tool that lets you put your trip together and will provide immediate pricing, plus a nifty world map charting your itinerary in just a few clicks.
Star Alliance — The Star Alliance (United, Air New Zealand, Thai Air, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, etc.) sells RTW tickets that give you an allotment of total miles to travel in a year with few restrictions and a high degree of flexibility (but higher cost). We purchased 34,000 miles, which gave us more than enough to give the earth a big hug.
Oneworld Alliance — The Oneworld Explorer (American, British Airways, Quantas, etc.) ticket allows you to purchase a number of continents in which to travel. You are then limited to a certain number of stops within each continent.
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"How do I learn more about traveling around the World?"
There is a varied amount of info out there on RTW travel. Lonely Planet has recently published a guide to Traveling Around the World. Here are some links that we found helpful as well as some sites from fellow travelers we met along the way:
Boots'n All — A great site with lots of travel resources, including ticketing (they use the Air-treks engine), message boards, and great travel logs from folks who just write in from the road.
Travel Library.com — Round-the-world travel guide that does a good job of laying out a nice checklist of traveling considerations. It’s a bit dated when it comes to prices and costs, but it does a fine job of helping you cover all the bases when planning your own RTW adventure.
The Chicken Bus — The Chicken bus was one of the first sites we found when planning our trip. It’s a well done site of travel tales and advice from a married couple, like us, who picked up and went for an eight-month walkabout that covered a remarkable number of countries.
The Dharma Bums — We spent a random half-hour on a bus in Thailand chatting with the Dharma Bums, and have kept in touch and met up lately for pancakes here in Gloucester, half a world away. Kate Rope and David Allan are both writers; she was a Luce Fellow at the Bangkok Post and he is a Frommer’s writer/freelance travel writer. Their site is a wealth of lovely and insightful articles about their travels.
Amy Tobey is an inspiration. Part Berkeley hippie, part Wall Street capitalist, over the last 10 years we’ve often watched Tobey just pick up and go. She is currently taking 15 months to travel the world, but recently reported: "I think I might just keep going this time." Here are some links to stunning photos of her most recent travels in South America.
Garvin and Karen Snell, a married couple who are Boston T.V. journalists, are taking a year to travel all the continents. Their tales of Laos and Mongolia are wondrous.
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"How far is it around the world?"
We could tell you, but the hilarious site below provides much more entertaining answers: What's the Circumference of the Earth?
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