After 2 months of drafting, 6 days of coordinating, and 5 calls to American Airlines, our flights are finally ticketed! We booked an around-the-world ticket with Oneworld Global Explorer. The westward track is 14 segments with 11 flights. This itinerary will get us back to Pennsylvania in October and we’ll set up a separate itinerary for South America to finish out the year.
We were surprised how long it took to finalize flights. During our research, it appeared that if we called American Airlines rather than booking the Oneworld Global Ecplorer online, we would be able to keep dates open-ended but found that to be untrue. We picked rough dates and confirmed that they could be changed without a change fee (although changing destinations will incur a fee). After the first lengthy call, we were told it would take 24 hours to price and that we would receive a call to establish payment. We actually never received that call or any other calls from American even after our credit card was declined twice while finalizing payment (happy to see fraud protection is active!). It was all resolved this morning and the tickets were finally issued. I should say, all the American Airlines reservation agents were very nice and helpful. We were just surprised they were not more proactive processing our Oneworld Global Explorer ticket.
Other progress updates:
We are both officially unemployed. By far, this was the hardest step! We both loved our jobs (except that they were located 800 miles apart) and leaving projects behind was difficult. But we still feel like this is the right decision and are hopeful our careers will continue to progress when we return.
This week, we’ll be moving our small apartment into storage. We are selling or donating some items (clothing, accessories, books, old electronics) but we plan on keeping almost all of our belongings. Our car and Jeep will be parked at our parents’ for safe keeping (thanks again!). We will be spending the holidays with family in Pennsylvania and Ohio before heading west on January 1st!
Our budget for traveling the world is $50 a day per person. Through research prior to the trip, we learned that New Zealand is one of those locations where it is very hard to stay on budget. But combining our transportation and lodging expenses by living in a campervan would be our best way to keep expenses down.
