Flights

Understanding routes and ticketing

Through an agent

Buying flight tickets through an agent means paying a third party to purchase all the flights for you. They can use their industry knowledge to source the best deals.

Travel agents can save you a lot of time and effort trawling through search engine results and airline websites to find the best flights.

One advantage of buying tickets through an agent is the convenience and reassurance of having a single point of contact if something goes wrong.

The biggest benefit can be cost. We saved thousands of pounds by using Travel Nation to book multi-destination tickets versus doing it ourselves on Australia - New Zealand - Japan flights!

However, once the tickets are booked there is sometimes a fee for date changes.

Route changes almost always incur a fee, plus the cost difference between the routes and are dependent on availability.

In addition, using an agent may mean you get a more limited choice of flights or you may find that your route options are limited, especially if you want to travel an unusual route.

Doing it yourself

Doing it yourself means spending time researching the flight routes, timings, restrictions and costs yourself.

When we are booking our own flights we only ever book direct with an airline. We treat Google, Flight Connections, and Skyscanner as search tools only and do not use them as booking agents.

The advantage of doing it yourself is flexibility and being able to choose exactly the routes, flights and airlines that you want.

However, doing it yourself takes a lot of time and effort and while sometimes it can save money, it can also end up costing more in total.

Round the World Tickets

A Round the World (RTW) ticket is a single ticket that allows you to visit multiple destinations. You can buy RTW tickets directly from an airline or through an agent.

RTW tickets simplify the process of booking flights because you just pick destinations and let the airline or agent work out the details.

RTW tickets can come with limiting conditions though. For example, having to travel in a continuous direction; not being allowed to backtrack; a cap on the number of surface legs; or having to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Using open-jaw tickets

Rather than flying to and from the same airport, open jaw tickets allow you to fly into one airport and depart from another.
This means you can make your way across a country or continent by land.
These tickets are therefore a great option for reducing the number of flights and avoiding back-tracking.
**For example we flew open jaw into San Francisco and out of Los Angeles so we could use sustainable land transport without back-tracking.**
Just remember that airlines may require you to show proof of onward travel if you have booked a one-way ticket (to make sure you intend to leave the country again). Before our flight to Peru we had to show our onward flight tickets to Argentina.

Getting from A to B

Not every airport is well-connected! This sounds obvious but it has a massive impact on route options.

Flight Connections is a useful website that shows routes between airports.

When we mapped the places we wanted to visit in South America, the sensible route looked to be from Cuzco in Peru to Salta in Argentina, before continuing to Iguazu and finishing in Buenos Aires for a flight back to the U.K.

But there were no direct flights between Cuzco and Salta; so we ended up doing a somewhat roundabout route around northern Argentina.

Flight times

Picking an ideal flight time isn’t easy! The most convenient flight times come at a higher ticket cost.

Don’t forget the time difference and consider jet lag before booking activities the day after a flight!

Avoid arriving in a new city in the middle of the night - fly overnight, (hopefully sleep), and arrive the next day. Or depart in the morning and arrive in the afternoon the same day.

Top tips for booking flights