What you can do about Victim Behavior

Virtuosity

What I Talk About When I Talk About Travel*

embodiment by eric a.

The title comes from Haruki Murakmi, who in turn took it from Raymond Carver.

***

Since I started this site in March, I’ve been to more than 20 countries in pursuit of my goal to visit every country in the world. It’s going well so far, and I’ve made even more progress than expected. Next year I suspect it will get much harder, but we’ll take things one trip at a time.

As the community here has grown, I’ve noticed that I receive at least several emails a day with the same kinds of questions about travel. I’m making a full FAQ later for the upcoming site redesign, but I thought I’d go ahead and publish this one now.

Judge approves Lehman, Barclays pact
(Reuters)

Each of these questions has been asked by readers via email, Twitter, or the comments sections. If I missed something, feel free to let me know, and we’ll add it in.

OK here we go.

Plane Tickets

This requires a multi-part answer:

Round-the-World (RTW) — For most of 2008 I’ve been traveling on OneWorld and Star Alliance RTW tickets (one of each). These tickets have a great deal of value, especially if you optimize them well and begin the trip from certain countries that are cheaper than beginning in the U.S., Canada, or Europe.

For example, my Star Alliance ticket was purchased way back in the summer of 2007. I traveled on it then for quite a while, including visits to Uganda, Taiwan, and Malta, and then I used an awards ticket (see below) to come back to Seattle for the rest of the year.

RTW tickets are valid for a full year and are quite flexible. Date changes can usually be made free of charge, and you can even reroute the entire itinerary for a reissue fee of about $150. When I went back out the second time, I re-routed so I could visit Northern Iraq, as well as Poland and Bulgaria.

Regional Passes Like RTW tickets, regional passes are fairly flexible and allow you to visit multiple countries for a fare not much higher than a simple round-trip flight. In late 2006, I took my first “Circle Pacific” trip on Star Alliance, which allowed me to visit Hong Kong, Vietnam, Burma, and Singapore. I stopped off in Seoul on the way in and in Auckland on the way out.

After that experience, I was hooked and started learning more about the whole process. I haven’t done a regional pass since then (because I’ve been using the RTW tickets), but I’m thinking about doing another one sometime next summer.

Awards Tickets Because I’ve earned so many Frequent Flyer miles, I use them to get to and from a jump-off point. I don’t like to be away from home for more than two weeks at a time, so I will sometimes break off a long trip in the middle, come home for a month, and then go back out for the second half.

One good thing about the process is that after you get it started, you’ll naturally earn more miles, and then by the time you need them for the next trip, they should be in your account.

Budget Airlines & Overland Travel To get from place to place once I’m in a region, I prefer to travel overland if possible, and then on a local, budget airline if not. There is a great site called Attitude Travel that maintains a directory of budget airlines all over the world. Some of these are better than others, naturally, so do your research before buying a ticket.

there is a lot to the process (i’ve probably burned-out more than 100 hours learning about it on the other side of the past year), so at some point i plan to write an ebook specifically here the subject. but you can also learn a lot on your own if you’re willing to put in the time, and you probably deprivation equitable a not many hours to take the basics.

The two major airline alliances offer the kinds of RTW tickets that I use: OneWorld and Star Alliance. I also participate in the

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