Round The World

A Round The World ticket is a great option for anyone wanting to do just that, go around the world. It's a very specific travel ticket that allows you to take advantage of the different airline alliances to visit a number of destinations at a lower cost.

Oneworld

This airline alliance offers Oneworld Explorer (the fare is based on continents), Global Explorer (the fare is based on distance) and Circle Pacific (intercontinental exploring the continents around the Pacific Ocean).

For all of these choices, you can choose up to sixteen legs. It varies as to the mileage and exact carriers and destinations.

Oneworld has an online booking option where you will be told the following

• travel in one direction

• visit each zone (Zone 1 North and South America, Zone 2 Europe, Middle East, Africa, Zone 3 Asia and South West Pacific)

• up to sixteen cities

• if you use another method between two cities it counts as a leg (e.g. arrive Los Angeles, leave San Francisco)

• up to one year

Star Alliance

It's a simpler option with this alliance - you start and finish in the same place, you stop between two and fifteen times, and you must travel in one direction, either east or west, crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans once as you travel.

Star Alliance has an online booking option where you will be told the following

• set your start airport and finish in the same country

• maximum 39000 miles

• one direction

• ten days to twelve months

• two to fifteen destinations

SkyTeam

This alliance hasn't reinstated its options since Covid but prior to that, their ticket was one of four mileage levels from 26000 to 38000 miles, with a maximum of fifteen stops.

Should this become available again we will update this story.

Choosing

The exact details of your trip will matter as to which is best - normally mileage and the number of stops will be key factors. Most routes can be tweaked if your timings change, although you might find additional fees for changing an airport.

Oneworld Explorer is of note for allowing you to ignore any other mileage - so if you decide to fly into Los Angeles and then drive to Houston, that driving leg doesn't count against any mileage.

Is it worth it?

We looked at the same routes by different methods to get a sense of prices - but whether the particular option is best for you will depend on so many personal factors that these should only be considered indicative.

We took four different routes, all starting six months from now with each flight a week apart. This was purely for consistency and comparison ease.

We found that the Round The World option was cheaper three times (by 20%, 15% and 3%) and more expensive (by 12%) another time. The savings came from accepting flights with alternative airlines (that is, not in the specific alliance) although these were all long-haul well-known carriers. We also picked a couple of flights that were slightly longer duration but still direct, with no more than fifteen minutes longer.

The learning point is that it could be a cheaper option, and that is without factoring in the accumulation of points by staying within an alliance, and the extras that might offer you. The downside is that you really do need to check it each time. In addition, small changes could make big differences. We routed through New York and found there were potential savings by changing airports. That could be true in any city with two or more airports, for example.

There are specialist bookers who may be able to help identify the ways to make use of less premium airports or to tweak routes and exact dates. Or you might just enjoy researching it yourself. You can find out a lot more about these three airline alliances by clicking any of the images below.