the fine details of booking flights

When Ady and myself first decided to go travelling it was a bit of a random decision; more of a way to escape working life and do something different than embrace all the World had to offer.

After various discussions we had a BIG list of countries we'd love to squeeze in and an appointment to visit STA in Birmingham to reign us in to what we could actually manage! The lucky travel agent / Tour operator / STA agent person in question was Dawn from the Birmingham uni branch (Thankyou!). She took the time (2 hours I think?!) to tell us about all the available options for RTW tickets that were available and advised us which would be best to satisfy our needs; it turned our that satisfying our needs required us to alter our (over ambitious) needs but we were able to get there in the end.

Booking with Quantas we ended up with the following flights:

• [London, Heathrow to New York, JFK]
• [LA, Tom Bradley to Fiji, Nadi ]
• [Fiji, Nadi to NZ, Auckland]
• [NZ, Christchurch to AUS, Melbourne Int]
• [AUS, Cairns to Singapore, Changi]
• [Thailand, Bangkok to Hong Kong, International]
• [Hong Kong, International to London, Heathrow]

Its worth noting that when booking flights you can usually only book 12 months in advance; this meant that we had to put through preliminary dates all within within the next 9 months or so but STA offer the chance to revise these dates (without extra charge) once flights become available; allowing you the flexibility to book your flights and get the money part out of the way but then sort the exact dates later on.

After you have made the initial booking you have 60(ish) days to pay the balance of the flights; during this time the taxes can change, and so the price can rise or fall. To help us out Dawn kindly re-booked the flights approx. 2 weeks after our first booking which gave us extra time to pay - very useful when you're waiting for the wages to role in. The flights came in at a cool £1480 (a huge chunk of which seems to be tax and apparantly will keep rising - carbon emission taxes / higher oil prices etc!) and will allow us to directly visit the USA, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong; although whilst in east Asia we're hoping to do our own thing for a few months and squeeze in a few more countries.