We were interested in buying the “One World Explorer – Global Explorer” ticket.
1st attempt - try the online tool !
On this tool, you can see the world map and you can choose your route (after deciding which kind of ticket class you want – we chose economy).
This was the fun part!
Careful as this is quite addicting! :D
We spent quite a few hours on this website !...
You can only fly one direction (East – West or West-East, for example) and choose whichever cities your heart desires!
After choosing the route, you should choose the days/flights you will be taking.
However this is where the tool gets quite tricky... And it is not very easy to understand.
There are very few flights available!
We found it weird that so few flights were available - if we searched directly on the airline website there would be a flight available!
What we have found out is when you buy such a RTW ticket (economy class), you are accepting that you will only fly a certain category of economy class (category L) and, depending on the airline, you can have category Y, W, Z ,etc.!
And the tool only shows the availability of the category L tickets!
2nd attempt - We then decided to get professional help and contacted STA travel agency .
They could find very different flight availability then what shows in the website !
It was a very effective help - in one hour we had our itinerary and tickets ready according to our desires! However there was a extra cost associated with the flight changes (date changes) which made us refuse the proposal – as we want to have our dates flexible.
3- Finally, we decided to call directly one of the airline companies member of the one world alliance that had offices in Portugal (Iberia) and book the RTW ticket via phone.
This was also tricky as the Iberia officers didn't recognize the ticket at first. We finally did manage to spell out our itinerary and requested a quote to be e-mailed to us.
Unfortunately this quote took 4 weeks (!!) to arrive and we had moved on to..
4th and final attempt to buy the ticket!!! -
Finally we decided to go to a portuguese travel agency (Agencia Abreu), where we were kindly assisted as we explained our itinerary. Although this kind of ticket wasn't known to the employee, she requested the information right away to the main office and the next day we had the quote in our inbox!