Preparations voyage

Though I am educated, it took me roughly months to understand how RTW tickets work. 

To travel round the world, you need to look at airline alliances. Among the most popular, there are OneWorld (British Airways, Qantas, LAN), Star Alliance (Lufthansa, Air New Zealand, Thai airlines) et Skyteam airlines (Air France, Delta, Korean Air). Because we'd like to stop over to South America, OneWorld seemed to be the only option. I had downloaded their 'travel planner' software and I had tried different itenaries. To start with, I had around 70 stopovers and it sounded fantastic but apparently the least the better. I had to reduce the number of stopovers to 2/3 per continent.  The price estimate were around £1700. However, I couldn't manage to book the bloody thing online. In the end, I had to go to a travel agency. I went to STA TRAVEL and was well received. The nice travel agent did everything for me. She warned me that the price on the website was before the airport taxes and that it will cost another £500 on top of the 1700. She resquested several quotes with different itenaries and after a week or so, I came back to finalise the booking and pay the bloody £4400.

For information, I went to the agency beginning of October and I finalise the booking mid-October.

Regarding the visas, we decided to take the Working Holiday Visa (WHV) for Australia as we are too old for the New Zealand one for instance. This visa will give us the opportunity to stay up o a year in Australia and to work in diverse sectors including voluntary work with animals.

Our biggest problem was our age. We had to apply before we turned 31. In my case this was March 07. The good thing was that we were made aware of it before my birthday so we applied early March 07. We therefore have to validate the visa before March 08.

For other visas, no need to plan too much in advance, we can enter most countries with an automatic holiday visa.