Insurance. The most important thing. However, it is overwhelming how many companies offer travel insurance in Europe. The problem is that they are all expensive and there are always 500 rules in their policies, of course all in the small print that one should read before purchasing. Of course the advertisement with huge flashing capital letters offering health coverage up to 5 000 000 British pounds is always a catch. Usually companies do not pay anything unless the bill is over 60-100 pounds, so counting on full coverage is an illusion. Unless one has a severe accident, the health coverage is probably not used in Africa, South America or most parts of Asia, because the doctor visits and medication is so cheap. There are also many inclusion and exclusion criteria of payments e.g. in the case of kidnapping, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. I read about 20 such policies until I found the most suitable for the most reasonable price. What is important is that one knows what activities one wants to do during the holidays. Many insurance policies do not include diving or mountaineering, bungee jumping, skydiving or white water rafting. Or they have special criteria: rafting only up to grade 3 rivers, only 3 bungee jumps etc. What is it about the magical number 3? Does it tell a lot about your possible dangerous other activities if you are planning to do 4 bungee jumps? You are not worth insuring? Very similar policies from the same insurance company (most companies sell a British insurance from AXA) are also often sold for different prices through different travel agencies like Trailfinders and World Nomads. So it is worth to compare the prices of different companies. And what the most important is: always read the small print!


Round the world (RTW) plane ticket. The cheapest way to cover many continents is this ticket. There are a few airline alliances that offer such tickets (One World, Star Alliance etc.). The coverage of the alliance members basically defines which routes are offered. For example having LAN in the alliance is very useful in South America (particularly for Easter Island and Tahiti) and Cathay Pacific in Asia. So having a rough itinerary will define the alliance one has to take. One thing we could find out was that the price of the very same ticket differs greatly depending on at which country one buys it (for One World the cheapest was from UK). However, organizing such a ticket individually takes a lot of time and nerves. The airline companies usually do not deal with customers via email. Talking to the airline companies directly is often a waste of time because most of the employees have no clue how to put together a ticket like this. Unfortunately, there are some 100 rules restricting the use of this ticket (so this is the catch) and not even the airline employees are familiar with these, often giving conflicting information (sometimes even stubbornly repeating the false information, just to later admit they were wrong). Walking spontaneously into the office of an airline company or trying to get information at the airport ticket sales office is pointless for this reason. The “best” is when one gives the wish-itinerary to an employee at these offices and then waits a few weeks for a reply from a knowledgeable employee to find out simply that the itinerary is not manageable. Period. No explanation or any alterations offered to make the itinerary work. There might be a few travel agencies that claim to specialize in that area and offer to arrange the flights, but they always charge extra for their service and some of them might have no actual experience in putting such a ticket together. Even companies with good reputation can be disappointing, offering a package for the double price than one could organize individually. And when one points it out, they ask you to tell them how you did that... OK, thanks for your help... Interestingly some companies do not even get back to you after you exchange a few emails with them...


If money is an issue and time is no constraint, then my suggestion is to try to arrange the flight schedule individually. It is a lot of work, takes a loooong time (I was fighting for 6 months for our ticket) and quite nerve wrecking though. Although most alliances offered an online booking tool for such purposes at the time we needed this service (spring 2009) it did not work properly. One World's tool for example was not able to process any flight in the Pacific region, so one had to arrange everything by phone. There was no other choice. There is one phone number one can call at BA in London and first of all one has to listen to a several minutes long standard introduction message. Tick tick tick... you can also almost hear your money going down the drain... Perhaps it is ok to listen to it once or twice, but not 20 times. And not for 20-30 minutes at a time, as it is how long it often takes to get trough to BA. And btw the calls are for an elevated rate...so what does that tell you about customer service? Whenever I was listening to their “your call is important to us...” prerecorded text in a gentle voice while I was waiting in the line I was actually hearing somebody shouting at me: “JUST DO NOT EVER CALL US”. Politely they also remind you that you can change the dates, chose your seat, set your menu requests etc. online with their online booking tool. Guess what? It does not work with the RTW ticket...

One more thing about their customer service: it works in a hierarchical system. You talk to the ignorant guy first, who usually only thinks he or she knows the rules of the RTW (of course by any means better than you anyhow, so arguing with this person is quite frustrating). Then he tells you that he will now send your request to the pricing department and in about 2 weeks they will give you a call. Sometimes they do not call back. Sometimes when you call back after 2 weeks and they tell you that good that you called because they were about to delete your request, because it has been so old. Funny people at BA...

One of my favorite story was when I was told several times that they will call back in a few weeks, when they get an answer from the pricing department, and a couple of calls later they say that for the pricing department it takes only 48 hours and I have to call back, because they will not call me. The most recent fun call was when we wanted to split our booking, because the 2 of us wanted to travel individually. One of the ignorant guys said that splitting the booking will take 5 days, so we have to decide well ahead. When I called 5 days ahead, the splitting of the booking was done in 15 minutes on the phone... oh, yes, my favorite ignorant BA guys...

Of course this whole cycle of talking to ignorant BA employees is repeating several times and of course every time you talk to a different person because the employees do not give you their direct number, so you always call the central number and get through to an employee randomly. Even if you remember the name of the employee you just talked to (to make it simple the only introduce themselves by their first name) 2 minutes ago (of course your cheap Skype connection drops often, so you have to start over again) it is not a big help, because the next employees just ask you: which Michael?? Ok so lets start all over again... But actually most often you have to start planning all over again because the employee at the pricing or whatever department, found it out that your request itinerary is not possible with this RTW ticket (are you still wondering why I call the customer service guy the ignorant one?).

Fortunately, they can also inform you about why your itinerary is not possible. A frequent reason is that you have too many segments on the same continent. Sometimes you just cannot fly with a given RTW ticket on certain partner airline flights or on certain routes. With our One World Explorer continent based RTW ticket it was not possible to get to Auckland from Tahiti. With the mileage based Global Explorer however, it would had been possible. It is also interesting that theoretically they do not allow to fly through the same city twice, but we did fly through Sydney twice. Once it might have counted as a non-stop over just to catch a connection though.

So after you waited 2 weeks for the answer that you have to change your itinerary, you try to come up with improvised ideas, because our ignorant employee friend is not really helpful with telling you where you COULD go, only tells you where you CANNOT go when you come up with a new destination. But of course this time he is wrong again, so after 2 weeks you again find out that your itinerary still will not work out. Actually, after months and months of such fascinating phone conversations with your new ignorant friend, your itinerary will eventually work out (if you have not ended up in the loony house yet and still have a few hairs to tear out) and you get a quote. And then you realize that this quote is actually higher that advertised on the website. And it is not because of the taxes that is not included in the price there, but because the 10% discount they offer with big flashy letters on their website does not apply to your order, because you initiated your purchase 6 months ago!!!! However if you abandon your order that you were fighting for so hard for so many months and start the procedure over again you will get the discount!!!! Surprise, surprise if you do that they are suddenly able to issue your ticket in 24 hours... What the hell is wrong with these people???

What I still cannot understand is that why is it not possible to talk directly to the pricing department or whoever decides about your itinerary and who seem to be aware of the RTW rules? If they got too many such inquiries I would understand that these knowledgeable guys would be continuously occupied by these RTW customers and as their salary is probably higher than that of the ignorant guys, it would cost the company more. But if they do actually get many RTW inquiries why cannot they dedicate one guy at the ignorant level only to this task? Then he would not be ignorant any more and could save 20 phone calls and a few hours of the customers life and spare a couple of nerves too and make the customers satisfied.


Money. Nowadays taking an ATM card and a Visa card is enough almost everywhere. There were ATMs everywhere we have been to, even in Africa, PNG and Laos, that are infamous for their lack of these machines. We had no problem picking up money anywhere. There were a few places where the Maestro card was not accepted, but even there the Visa or Mastercard was OK. Travelers cheques (TC) are overrated in my opinion, we actually never needed them. We only used them in order to get rid of them and that also only on a few occasions, because there is a surcharge almost everywhere that makes using them a bad business. I cannot quite understand the reasoning that TC is good for safety reasons, particularly why it is supposed to be better than an ATM card. If they get stolen it only means that the money will not be lost, but it will not solve the problem of being out of money. If one only carries plastic money the situation is the same, as blocking the cards is quite easy.

Unfortunately, our banks always charged us for the cash withdrawal from ATMs (more with the Visa and Mastercard than with the Maestro), but as I have heard there are some banks that do not do that. So asking it in advance is a good idea. It is also essential to let your bank know that you will be traveling, also how long and where to, because otherwise it might happen that they block the card for security reasons due to unusual activities (it happened to me when I went to the US for a congress and it was quite inconvenient). A credit card is a good alternative to pay for certain things directly particularly to replace the expensive cash withdrawals with a Maestro card. Although there is no extra charge from the issuing banks on credit card payments, it is not widely accepted in those parts of the world we visited. If it is accepted, there is usually a surcharge.

Besides cards some cash is also good to have. Just in case. I think USD is the most widely accepted.


Vaccinations.


Packing list.

the most useful things for us were:


not useful (or not necessary in large quantities) things


equipment for special activities:


not sure how to handle things:


Csilla, 2010-10-13