RTW30 is BootsnAll's round-the-world planning course: one email a day for 30 days, taking you from "I want to do this someday" to a route, a budget, and a departure date. It launched in February 2013 and ran in five editions. Here's what each one covered, and where things stand while we rebuild it.
RTW30 is one email a day for thirty days. Day one you have a vague idea about taking a year off. Day thirty you have a route, a budget you believe, and a date on the calendar. It launched in February 2013 and became one of the most-used things BootsnAll ever made.
The course never tried to be a destination guide. It was the boring, load-bearing part of planning a long trip: how much this actually costs, what to do with your apartment, which flights to book first and which to leave open, what insurance covers when you are gone eleven months instead of two weeks.
What it covered
Thirty days, one task each. The work moved from the decisions that scare people off to the logistics that quietly sink trips:
- Choosing a route, and how the order of your stops changes what the whole trip costs
- Building a real budget, then funding it - including selling what you own to top it up
- Booking strategy: what to lock in before you go, what to leave open once you are moving
- Travel insurance for long trips, which is a different product from the holiday kind
- Gear and packing - how to shop for it once instead of three times
- The unglamorous admin: your stuff, your mail, your job, the people you are leaving
The five editions
Same thirty-day spine, different reader. Each one assumed a different starting point rather than repeating the same advice with the nouns swapped.
RTW30
The original. Written for an adult with a job and a rough plan to leave for somewhere between six months and two years.
RTW30 Family Edition
Long-term travel with kids along. Schooling on the road, pacing a trip around people who do not want to walk another temple, and the fact that every number in your budget multiplies.
RTW30 Career Break Edition
For people going back to work afterwards. Timing the exit, keeping the resume intact, and planning a trip with a fixed end date rather than an open one.
GAPYEAR30
Aimed at graduating seniors with no experience living on their own, so it starts further back: budgeting, lodging, and staying healthy and safe on the road. It also introduced the Travel Access Project, which helped students turn a year abroad into something admissions boards and employers could read.
GAPYEAR30 for Parents
The other half of that conversation. Written for parents who have not travelled this way themselves and are trying to be useful rather than anxious while their kid plans it.
Where it stands
We are rebuilding RTW30. The archive above is what it covered, and the shape is not changing - one email a day, thirty days, from idea to departure date. What we are not doing is putting a signup box here that drops your address into a list nobody is sending to yet.
In the meantime the planning material the course was built on is free and on this site right now. Start with the RTW planning guides - route planning, budgets, tickets, insurance and gear are all there, minus the daily nudge.
If you want the flights part handled by a person rather than a form, AirTreks has been booking multi-stop and round-the-world tickets since 1987.