| Brad and Jen's World Adventure Air travel |
| There are a lot of different ways to manage your air travel. I would reccomend The Practical Nomad, by Edward Hasbrouke (check book link), as a good place to start researching. You can purchase an "around the world" ticket, you can purchase each leg of your trip seperately before departure, or you can purchase your flights as you move. There are benefits and deficits with each approach and much depends on your itinerary and travel goals. We have purchased a one year "open", round trip ticket from Chicago to Bangkok, Thailand. We set our departure date and then have one year to utilize the second portion of the ticket to come home. Our original intention was to purchase the next legs of trip before we left. The next flight we needed was Bangkok, Thailand to Kathmandu, Nepal. If you have followed international news lately you will recall that in June a member of the Royal Nepali family massacered many of his family members. We decided not to purchase the ticket in the off chance the country was not stabilized by the time we were scheduled to go there. Our strategy became to purchase the tickets in Thailand when we are ready move on to Nepal. Since we are staying in one region, will be utilizing land transportation. We have a very flexible itinerary, and will be purchasing our air tickets as we need them. We will only need to purchase 2 to 3 more air tickets in the next year. We dealt with two travel agencies and found both to be helpful. We started with Airtreks. Their website is very helpful for getting a feel for prices and destinations. They specialize in "Around the World" travel planning. Our trip did not end up being around the world, so they referred us to the Adventure Travel Network. We worked with a chap named David Edwards. He made some good recommendations and proved to be a good resource. We have a flight travel budget, and after shopping between these two organizations, watching the newspapers, and investigaing air couriers, decided this was the easiest way to go. There are ton of other agencies to choose from, so dive in as deep as you want! |