Published on : 01 November 20193 min reading time
The budget is the pet peeve when you prepare a trip around the world because in the end, before leaving, once you leave and return, everything (or almost everything) is about sub-sub!
AIRLINE TICKETS
From the beginning, we didn’t want to pay more than 3500 € per person for air tickets, that was our imperative! We spent a lot of time on the internet reading and comparing different experiences, the best between round-the-world tickets, tickets as they went along and alliances. The problem when you start to find out is that in general no one does the same itinerary as you. As a result, you can’t tell yourself that since “he paid so much for doing this itinerary, we’ll be about that amount”. To set our budget and know about what to expect, we cheated a little: We made a quote in December 2014 at the Zip World agency by bringing our departure date forward to March 1, 2015. We have already been able to see with the agency which flights were possible and which were not (because the agency does not work with all the companies, because sometimes stopovers make no sense at all etc.). As a result, we have reworked our itinerary to be more consistent.
We were pleasantly surprised by Zip World: quick answer, good advice, serious explanations, detailed flight plan in short we were seduced from the beginning! In addition, their first estimate was 3060€ per person, so it was just what we needed. We updated the estimate in April, we are at 3140€ per person (the increase is due to changes in dates, to the fact that a flight has been modified and especially during the euro which is rising… long live the economy!) The only drawback: all our flights can be modified free of charge except one (90€ fee to modify it), who knows why we didn’t understand everything!
By acquisition of conscience we have nevertheless made an estimate elsewhere to be sure to make the right choice and have at least one comparison. We decided to focus on Travel Nation: we didn’t get an answer to our online quote so we had to restart them, we had no explanations and very few flights matched what we had asked for (for the others the starting point, arrival point or date didn’t match) and moreover the price was higher. Having already finalized the quote at Zip World we knew that our itinerary was feasible and very frankly in view of the answer from Travel Nation we didn’t want to go any further.