Once you have selected a winning Alliance for your Round the World cheap tour and you have selected your cities by priorities, take a look at which are the cities that this alliance flies to and place them in categories according to the level of interest your have for them. You can do it by using a very simple classification process that I explain in my “Round the World Cheap Tour Planning – City Selection Process” article. There is also explained a way to select the adequate Alliance (Star Alliance, OneWorld or Sky Team) to do your trip according to your city preferences.
Now it is time to decide the number of cities you want to visit according to the time you want to spend for your tour and the time you want to spend on average for every city. When you know the number of cities you will be able to visit dividing the number of days you have available by the average time you want to spend per city, select them starting from the ones that are on the upper levels of the classification, and go down.
It will be a point in which you will need to choose between cities placed in a same level because your final number does not allow you to choose all them in this level. You can do it a your own way, or use the same classification system within this level. Your choice! At this point, you will finally have the exact cities you want to visit during your Round the World cheap tour.
Take a world map and put anything on the map to point the places where those cities are. Take a look at the conditions that your Alliance sets (number of miles allowed, number of stopovers, minimum of continents you need to visit, rules travel according to movement from one continent to another, etc).
Everything clear?
Well, now the time has come to draw the magic lines following this rules. Most of the Alliances will tell you that you can’t leave a continent and come back to that one. This, far from being a rule that will kill you, it is something very reasonable in a way to avoid you from spending useless miles. In any case, there are occasions where this could be a bit of trouble, specially for close continents like Asia and Oceania, but in general it will help keep your Round the World cheap.
Another condition that will always apply is that you must choose one direction and move according to it. Also, you will almost probably need to finish in the same continent where you started the trip and, in some occasions, even in the tourist places same country. They do it to avoid you from using the highly reduced prices for a World Tour trip to travel to distant places.
When you look at your cities in the map, there is another thing that you also can notice. That most of your cities are in one single continent, or most of them. The three major alliances have options like Circle Asia, Circle Africa, European Tour, and similar possibilities. In case you really realize that you are interested in one specific continent, don’t take a tour option, but select a Continental Pass that will be a lot more economic.
To make this process easier, it is also important to note that the three alliances offer a good planning engine where you can plan your trip once you have selected your cities in an interactive map, and even it tells you if you breaking any of the conditions, Look for it, as it will be helpful specially when counting your miles. Most of times, travel the number of miles will determine whether you will pay a higher fare or not.
In the end, keep in mind that a Round the World cheap tour is a completely unforgettable experience that you must enjoy to the limits. An adequate planning according to your needs will enhance the value you will take out of this adventure. Time to pack has come!