I doubt you need inspiration for this part.
Many people have lists in their head or written down of their dream round-the-world trip and the countries they’ve always wanted to see. Gambling the college fund in Vegas, hiking the Himalayas, Patagonia, Paris, Australia, Fiji – you name it.
So you can figure that part out for yourself, but based on our planning you need to take into account four factors:
- Where do you want to go?
- Where will your family enjoy?
- Where is ‘in-season’ in terms of weather?
- Costs, and this is linked to style in which you travel and also flights.
You need to get all these four right, really. Or at least if you want some harmony you do. If you’re deeply selfish with skin like a rhino ignore the ‘where will your family enjoy?’ and just book what you want.
For us, one place we’d love to go is the Himalayas but we figured our girls are a bit young for trekking and Buddhist ceremonies. Hang on, perhaps that’s exactly what we need to exorcise their youtube addictions…… too late.
We also looked at Argentina only to work out that it was the wrong time of year. Funnily enough the first travel agent we spoke to didn’t tell us this and we almost ended up in the grey cold South America rain. We are good at rain, being from the UK, and so we do not need to experience more of it. Be aware that if someone’s job is to sell holidays to Country A then they will try to do that, a bit like estate agents (realtors) always advising a wary seller to ‘test the market’ and start marketing their property.
In fact we are in Costa Rica for their rainy season. Not deliberately (we’re not that odd) but it just happened and we’ve factored that into our planning. And if it rains all day then I’m sure our “YOU SAID IT ONLY RAINED FOR ONE HOUR A DAY” argument will be heard from the neighbouring countries.
The Costs part matters and it will affect how long you go away for.
For us, it seems that Mexico will be the cheapest part of our trip. So if staying away from the UK for the longest time was a priority (eg we’re on the run for large-scale fraud) then we’d spend more time there.
If you want to go to, for example, Norway, then you need to really understand just how amazing the prices are, where ‘amazing’ is defined as morale-crushingly expensive.
Flights
We are so used to buying flights ourselves from comparison sites or direct from airlines, that it is easy to miss out on the round-the-world (RTW) deals. Each group of airlines (alliance) has their own type of RTW ticket. They assume that for each ‘sector’ you fly into certain aiports and out of certain aiports, and then the ticket can be very good value, eg you fly into one Asian airport and out of another (say Delhi and Bangkok) and go to the next sector which is OZ / NZ.
If you want to freestyle (fly into Dubai and out of Nairobi) then you add on lots of cost.
A good travel agent may advise you to buy the RTW ticket and bolt on ‘side’ trips. This is worth taking the time to investigate and it goes beyond just sitting on expedia / opodo etc.
Travels with my Family 