Preparation
So... What does it really take to do a round the world trip?
Well, the reality is that we don't really know. We're trying to figure this out. You can ask us this question at the end of the trip and we'll probably have a better answer, but in the meantime, here's what we THINK it takes to do it. And if you have experience or recommendations on any of these topics, please come talk to us, we would love that.
We've split this page up into the following topics:
Money
We often get asked how much it costs to do such a trip and, again, we're not entirely sure. It all depends on the level of comfort you're after and on what you're willing to sacrifice to stay within a budget, so the figure can vary dramatically. You also need to consider that prices vary greatly between places.In our case, what we did was to average $100 AUD per person, per day. That will hopefully cover all our costs: accommodation, food, tours, transport, etc.
We've been saving money for about a year and a half now, and we hope that this budget will get us through the trip without coming back home with a massive debt with the bank.
We'll be bringing $100 AUD per person, per day, for our year-long trip.
In terms of how we will store and spend our money, we will have one shared debit account and a credit card. We've been using Citibank for our travels for a while now, their Citibank Plus everyday account is amazing as they don't charge fees on ATM withdrawls overseas (!) and there's no annual fee. For our credit card, we've decided to go with the Bankwest Zero Mastercard as again, there are no annual fees and there are no foreign transaction fees.
Why both? A credit card is an extra layer on insurance on purchases (and back up if we lose our debit card), so it will mainly be used for online purchases (flights, accommodation, tours etc). Whereas for everyday cash withdrawls and purchases, the Citibank card will suit us perfectly. As an extra backup we have a seperate savings account, so we need only transfer a small amount of money into our Citibank account at a time, in case of theft.
Job
Fernando quit his job ahead of this trip. It's never an easy decision, but one that had to be done. Who knows what we'll want to do when we're back?Alex negotiated a gap year agreement with her company, which means that she can express her interest in coming back to work there after one year, if that's her wish. It is not guaranteed that a position will be available to her, but the company will have to make the effort to find her something.
As for work while we're away? This one we haven't decided on yet. We've budgeted it so that we don't have to work during the year, but we will have one laptop between us and an ipad with a keyboard, so if need be we are equipped to do some remote work.
Packing
Probably one of the biggest challenges (especially for Alex), we will only be bringing a 38L carry-on bag with us. That way we can always have it on us and won't have to waste time waiting for our luggage at the airport luggage belt or worry about it getting lost.As we will be flying with a lot of budget airlines, we have to make sure our bags adhere to the maximum weight allowances; the lowest we've seen is 7kgs (Air Asia amongst others) - so that's what we will aim to stick to!
Alex has done a post on everything she's planning to bring in her 7 kilos, you can read about it here.
Travel Insurance
We did a fair bit of research on this topic. It's never something you want to worry about, but that most certainly you need to have covered.We looked into a few companies that offer round the world travel insurance here in Australia - Insure&Go, TID - and we landed on World2Cover.
It's a Japanese company owned by Tokyo Marine, which scored 71% on the Choice website, that does a fairly comprehensive (and unbiased, unpaid) comparison of Insurance companies based on a number of factors, such as policy benefits, claim process, price, etc.
The World2Cover Top insurance policy, for 365 days, worldwide, cost us just under AUD 1,000 per person.
When deciding on an insurance company, these were our main criteria:
- Price - shouldn't be too expensive, but we didn't want the cheapest either as it probably means you'll have a really hard time claiming any money back from them. Which leads to the next point...
- Claims Score - What is the average success rate with disputes for that company? Some companies had great prices and coverage, but when it came to the customers that actually had to make a claim, there were more bad ratings than good ones - this is a really important thing to look out for and the key reason we went with World2Cover
- Inclusions - I spent my fair share of time reading PDS's and for the most part, with the insurance companies/levels we were looking at, the coverage was more or less the same. It's important, however, that you aren't paying for things you know you don't need (e.g. for us: pet insurance, a flight home etc) and that you are getting sufficient cover on the things you think you'll most likely need (a big one for us was money compensation on travel delays and coverage for lost items).
Visas
Yep, quite a lot of work... So for the visa situation - until now, we haven't found any magic trick to get us trough the bureaucracy other than looking at each country we plan on visit and check the visa needs for each one of them.Both the Australian an the Brazilian immigration bodies keep a very handy list up to date, which details the visa requirements for each country, based on your nationality.
So we just created a spreadsheet (Alex's special) listing the countries we want to go to, the visa requirements for them and when we need to apply. As we learned, a lot of them only let you apply for a visa a few weeks or months before your trip, which means we'll have to do a lot of that while on the road.
Flights
We debated and researched a lot to decide whether we should get a Round the World ticket or just make our way around with individual tickets.There's a lot of companies out there offering competitive prices for RTW tickets, such as RoundAbout Travel who offers Round the World tickets including stops in 3 continents for somewhere around AUD 2,200.
It all comes down to the itinerary you have in hand. In our case, we decided not to get a RTW ticket, and instead get the individual tickets as we go, because our plan accommodated for that. So what we're doing is:
- Fly Sydney to India, where we start our trip
- Got most of our internal flights in Asia on an AirAsia sale, which had tickets for as low as AUD 100 (Tokyo to Hong Kong) or AUD 120 (Kuala Lumpur to Osaka)
- From there we'll make our way to Russia, hopefully to see the FIFA World Cup (maybe on a train?)
- Ground transport for most of Europe or cheap flights
- Fly London - North America via Iceland, which from what we've seen doesn't look too expensive
- Ground transport for most of North America
- Fly to South America
- Use our Qantas Points to fly from South America back home.
That's another good point about it: we signed up to a lot of credit card offers that had Qantas Points as bonus, and racked up our points to a point that we now have enough to get a São Paulo - Sydney flight using our points.