Flying Around the World Can Save You Money

The disparity in airline ticket pricing will haunt me forever, and I have a BS in Mathematics. I can only imagine the algorithm they use to determine the price of a ticket; "Take the cost of the fuel to get the plane there and back, add $10,000 for the CEO's Christmas bonus, divide it by the number of passengers we think we might have, then multiply the result by the demand for the seat, and double it every hour as we approach the departure date." I went to Tokyo last year a few times and the discrepancy between a coach and a business class seat was astronomical.

On NWA, a coach class seat to Tokyo, Japan (Narita airport) was around $800. Not bad. Would anyone care to guess the value NWA places on a business class ticket for the same flight? If you guessed $12,000 (yes, twelve THOUSAND US dollars), then congratulations, you can move to the front of the line.

My company has a generous policy about travel to the Pacific Rim and it allowed me to book the flight at that ridiculous premium (for that, I'm grateful). However, as a man who grew up as a very poor kid in Southern Louisiana, I felt "price guilt" all the way to the Emperor's Castle.

Alas, soon afterward I was asked to go to Bandung, Indonesia and I felt the heartburn of "price guilt" rising once again.

So; I searched for alternatives and I found an extremely cool deal! I realized after looking at a globe (seriously, the physical, spherical, globe sitting on the bar in my living room), that if you were to dig a hole in my backyard in Minnesota, you'd come out on the beach right off of Jakarta, Indonesia. "Why," I asked myself, "is there such a thing as a 'direct flight' to this place when it’s the same distance to the East or West?" NWA wanted more than $12,000 for the "direct flight" to Jakarta (you can't fly to Bandung, you have to get to Jakarta first, then drive or take a Donkey the rest of the way but I digress). The "direct flight" stopped in Tokyo first, so I knew I would have to make at least one stop, therefore, why not look for options going East?

I found the answer! NWA offers a Business Class "Around the World Fun Fare" for $8,000 (coach was just barely over $1,000 which is an excellent deal if you can sit in a coach seat on a plane for 46 hours). How cool is that!? There are some restrictions, but as restrictions go, these are AWESOME! For example, they MAKE you spend the night in Amsterdam and in Singapore. Awesome. They MAKE you schedule it over a weekend. Even more Awesome. The advantages to this are numerable:

• How many people can say they flew all the way around a planet?
• When you get home, you've flown over 25,000 miles and that goes a LONG way toward bumping your Elite status to Platinum (the most exalted goal of any business traveler, go Platinum once, you'll never survive Gold again).
• You'll see the world. Literally.
• You'll save a ton of your (or your boss's) money! (Usually a good thing)
• You'll eat fantastic meals and buy unbelievable souvenirs at ridiculous prices.
• You can write the whole thing up in a cool travel blog like mine (shameless plug)

Itineraries are pretty flexible.  You don't HAVE to go to Indonesia (I recommend against it), you could spend the night in Munich where it just happens to be Octoberfest right now, then push on to Moscow or something.  Here was my itinerary from Minneapolis:

1. Minneapolis to Amsterdam, spend the night (darn it)
2. Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur (going around the Iraqi no-fly zone which looks very cool on your GPS)
3. Check out the elephants that harvest bananas (that was a bonus)
4. Kuala Lumpur to Jakarta
5. Drive to Bandung and work for a week (nothing is free)
6. Jakarta to Singapore, spend the night (get spectacular tailored clothing for pennies on the US dollar)
7. Singapore to Tokyo
8. Tokyo to Portland, Oregon
9. Portland to Minneapolis