When you just start the planning process of a RTW trip, you’ll read about people booking their RTW tickets and – quite rightly – assume that they’re all talking about a particular kind of airline ticket that you book all at once and that lets you travel around the world. That’s what “RTW ticket” sounds like it is, and there are, in fact, tickets that work like that – but that’s not your only option for getting around the world on your dream itinerary.

Depending on the round the world ticket you’re looking at, you may be faced with restrictions on what direction you have to travel in, or how many stops you can make in a given timeframe, or other rules that may cramp your travel style more than you’d like them to. If you want your RTW trip to involve a couple of back-and-forth stops – or at least have the freedom to not keep going in the same direction around the globe the entire time – one option is to string together a series of cheap one way flights.

Putting together a multi-stop RTW itinerary with a collection of cheap one way flights gives you the utmost in flexibility. Not only can you move hither and yon about the globe in any direction you’d like without penalty, you can also hop from airline to airline without being stuck with one airline alliance and their particular route network. There are no time limits, and you can just keep going and going until you’re ready to be done traveling.

Booking cheap one way tickets can – as the name implies – also save you money. If you won’t be flying back and forth to one destination, buying a round-trip ticket and only using half of it is a waste. And depending on where you are in the world, there may be a host of smaller or budget carriers that specialize in one-way short-haul flights – in some places, such airlines are competing with local rail travel as the cheapest way to get from one city to another.

You can buy cheap one way tickets as you go, or you can book a whole trip with them all at once. The former is easy to do on your own as you need to, but the latter typically requires a bit of assistance. The RTW tickets you can buy through BootsnAll on this site are a series of cheap one way tickets, so it’s definitely worth plugging your itinerary into our Round the World Trip Planner to see the prices we can offer.

photo by kennymatic