MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
We are planning to visit family next winter (Christmas 2017) and, as they are scattered across the globe (LA and Melbourne) we have started to discuss the idea of taking our girls out of school for a week or so and making a proper trip of it – flying to LA, on to Melbourne then carrying on and going to NZ (South Island) then over to Thailand then home via Dubai. We would be leaving in the week before Christmas and taking around 4 weeks in total.
Has anyone done similar? Any idea of costs (initial research is suggesting around £1400 per ticket and accommodation in LA / Melbourne won't cost us anything so would just have hotels for the remainder of the trip). Is it a feasible idea? Any other routes we should consider?
No doubt our final plan will be very different from this initial idea, but it would be great to hear about any experiences anyone has had.
Cheers.
Gut reaction is that 4 weeks seems a bit short for that many stops. You'll lose a lot of time to travel. I'd be tempted to cut out NZ and Dubai. Might mean it's cheaper to just get standard flights. More than enough to do in those three locations plus spend time with family.
I'd say the order there is wrong - NZ is 3 hours the 'wrong' way - so 6 hours extra un-necessary flying. if you insist on doing those stops (I'd agree, it is too many for 4 weeks - you can spend 4 weeks in either Thailand or NZ without getting bored), swap NZ and Melbourne over.
I agree we would be trying to fit lots in and we could easily spend much longer in any one of these destinations but we wanted to take the opportunity to give our girls (who will be 8 when we go) a taste of some different cultures, even if it's only for a few days.
Thanks for the feedback so far though 🙂
We did a similar trip for our honeymoon.
Air NZ to Auckland, you're allowed 1 "free" stopover each way, so we did London-Hong Kong - Auckland - Cook Islands - LA - London.
We spent the bulk of our time in NZ (2 weeks, not enough) a week chilling in Cook Islands (long enough) and a couple of days in HK & LA each.
I'd scrap the NZ, Thailand and Dubai bits and do extra stuff inside Australia and/or the USA to pad the time out. Transiting to 5 destinations will knock the best part of a week out of your time, it's too ambitious and will knacker you out.
But we would need to have a stop-over when coming back from Oz so even if we knocked bits out, I would rather have a stop-over with a few days spent exploring...???
As you say its quite a lot of travel, if you do go via NZ you can also do stopovers in the Pacific like Cook Is or Hawaii which I would recommend with kids. You can go LHR - HK - MEL - AKL - HAW - LA - LHR
Although not around the world, did what seemed a fair bit of travelling on one ticket through Quantos. They have a handy portal that will let you book/cost the tickets if your just researching for now.
But we would need to have a stop-over when coming back from Oz
Why ?
I agree with the others - **** that for a game of soldiers and IMO it will make your kids not want to travel again - that sounds horrific for young kids.
4 weeks - 2 in US and 2 in OZ. YOur body clocks will be messed up enough as it is without trying to fit 3 more stops in there.
We did it, but spread over six months! London - Bangkok Singapore - Sydney - Christchurch - Santiago - Rio - London.
Trailfinders were very helpful for making the arrangements (including internal flights in S. Amercia) and were competitive on price.
Yeah we will be speaking to Trailfinders in the coming months, all I am doing right now is starting initial research so I am armed with some basic idea of what we might want to do 🙂
I wish we had six months to spend doing it but that won't be happening! It will already mean some extensive begging by my wife to get additional time off (I will be dipping in and out of work remotely but it's my business so I will just do what I need to as and when I need to).