Round the World Adventure - 2024

Wait what? A trip around the world visiting cities? I hear you ask, that's not your usual type of trip. No it's not, but with Alan reaching a significant life milestone in 2024 we decided to celebrate this with a trip of a lifetime and with the majority of our trips being pretty special anyway we needed it to be extra special. Despite what you may think when you read where this trip took us, it was Alan's special trip, yes I helped shaped some activities, but the cities we visited were Alan's choices and he was quite happy with the plans we made together.

The trip plan was designed to take advantage of the OneWorld Explorer ticket, a round the world plane ticket that allows you up to 16 flights to travel the globe, there are restrictions which we have explained, but it was a massively cheaper way to do multiple flights than if you booked them without this special ticket.

This number of flights also helped us to renew our British Airways Gold status during the seven weeks after our BA tier points reset and before our Gold status dropped to Silver. This was the optimum time to earn Gold status because you kept your status duiring the trip and then it was renewed for the next 2 years. We travelled in business class throughout the trip which easily gave us more than the 1500 tier points required to achieve Gold. Well... that was the original plan! In February 2024 (after we had booked the OneWorld Explorer ticket), BA announced a change to the tier point earnings year period for everyone and our new earning year was changed to 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2025. Our plan still earned us Gold status but wouldn’t give us 2 years of that status, just until April 2026. The good news is our existing Gold status allowed us access to all the Gold benefits during our round the world trip. Phew! 

The adventure took us to cities we hadn’t visited for many years and to a couple of new destinations.

I have added links to each of the main destinations below - I will refine the parts of the trip report I did live when we get back home, meanwhile you can read about the 'fun' we had sorting the flight arrangements and planning this adventure here and what I have written to date and the photos via the links below.