Expert: Stephen Tanenbaum - 1/3/2008

Question
Very enterprising!  Do you know anything about round the world tickets.  My wife and I are retired too, and we have gone back to graduate school to get degrees in teaching English as a second language.  We will be teaching in Taipei, Taiwan from August 2008-July 2009.  We would like to fly from New York to Paris, spend 6 weeks in France, fly to Taiwan in August, 2008, the fly back to New York at the end of June 2009, maybe via Hawaii, or Australia? I wonder if a round the world ticket might not be a lot cheaper than buying one way tickets all the way around.  Also, I would love to subscribe to your newsletter, but I couldn't activate the "starburst" link on your website. Can you give me a address where I can subscribe.  Many thanks, Jeremy Sykes

Answer
When we early retired in '99 one of our first three month trips was Around the World air broker tickets from:

http://www.airbrokers.com/

Worked like a charm. As I recall $1,599 for SFO-Hong Kong- Thailand-Greece- Paris- London- SFO  JUST AWESOME!

Just checked their web site and they still note that most
sets of such tickets are good for up to ONE YEAR. So it may be perfect for you IF it fits within the air broker ticket time frame. Read on...

All major airlines like Cathay Pacific, British Airways etc. ANd with one call you can change dates (not destinations) with no penatly or fee.

Since your teaching assignment is somewhere between 10 and 12 months this can be a problem if tickets do not extend beyond one year. ex. one year in Taiwan, 6 weeks Paris, Hawaii etc. and you may have closer to 15 months or more.

In the meantime perhaps you can use FREE airline tickets which should be easy given your departure is not until the Summer. I just answered a question re: FREE airline travel. Here is a copy of that fairly long answer:

I took a few minutes to Google and came up with this ‘current’ offer from United Airlines. Obtain this FREE credit card with a few keystrokes and United will GIVE YOU YOUR FREE RT TICKET TO ANYWHERE IN THE LOWER 48. That is to say United will give you 25,000 FREE Bonus miles good for a FREE RT United ticket anywhere in the continental U.S.

Any catches? Not really. There is the single requirement the you must spend $250 using the card which takes most of us a matter of days weeks or a month at most. Then you get the miles good for your free flight. And as mentioned this offer waives the fee for the card to the FREE RT ticket is 100% FREE.   

As noted I did this off the cuff. You can learn all you need to know about free travel, how to set up your FREE United Airlines and other free airline frequent flyer accounts (that is where your miles will go till used) in my FREE newsletter. I also wrote an article on FREE airline travel so that I can easily share the info with you and others.
Here are the all important LINKS:

Check out my fun promo YouTube video for my FREE online
newsletter: www.youtube.com    Then in the search box type the name of my video: Free Global Travel 4 You

Here is my Summer newsletter with the first article being on Citibank’s also very cool free miles offers that can ALSO get you FREE tickets. Order two free cards and fly FREE RT to MAUI for example.
Here is the LINK: http://freectnsummer2007.blog.com/
My FREE Travel Article: http://ctnsummer2007ed.blogspot.com


And here is our latest Fall/Winter 2007 Free  newsletter:
http://ctndec07.blog.com/

Read all of these and welcome to the world of FREE AIRLINE travel.

As you read NOTE my discussion of the SECOND free flight.

Ex. Fly free to MAUI and then get a free second flight from Maui to San Francisco and then the free flight home. That would cost you 35,000 miles which you can do with two Citibank credit cards offering 15,000 and 20,000   OR with the
25,000 you can fly to any TWO US cities example. If you lived in NY you could fly FREE to SF them FREE to Miami and then home all for the 25,000.

Let me know if you have any questions after you familiarize yourself.

Good luck and HAPPY TRAVELS

STEVE T.






http://www.firstusa.com/cgi-bin/webcgi/webserve.cgi?partner_dir_name=united_sign...


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Good luck on you plans. Best would be spending at least a full month before and after your assignment using air broker tickets to travel to multiple destinations. You will have to see what works.

Steve T.

PS: looks like 70,000 miles for an award from the US to Taiwan.