RTW EXPERTS

Updated 12 September 2026

If you dream of taking a trip around the world, this website is for you. From independent travellers to organised tours, you'll find all you need.

This page is the short list of where to buy in 2026, for tickets and for tours. AirTreks now runs this site and is on the list. So are the airline alliances it competes with.

Round-the-world tickets

There are two ways to buy one. An airline alliance sells you a single ticket with its own rulebook, or a specialist builds the trip from separate fares on whichever airlines fit.

The alliance fares

oneworld Explorer is priced by how many continents you visit, three to six, and allows 3 to 16 flights. You keep heading east or west, cross both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and finish in the city where you started. oneworld also sells Global Explorer, priced on distance, and Circle Pacific for trips that stay around the Pacific.

Star Alliance Round the World is priced by total miles and allows up to 15 stopovers and 16 flights on its 26 member airlines. The trip can last from 10 days to a year, and you can book it yourself with the alliance's Book and Fly tool. First class tickets issued since 1 July 2026 have to be finished by 1 October 2027.

SkyTeam stopped selling its round-the-world ticket in 2023, though older guides still describe it.

A specialist

AirTreks has built multi-stop trips since 1987. It isn't tied to an alliance, so one route can mix a low-cost airline in Asia with a long-haul flight on Emirates and leave gaps you cover by bus, train or boat.

The alliance fares look simple on their websites, at roughly US$3,000 to $10,000 in economy. The catch is seats. The fares only use a few booking classes, and AirTreks, which runs about 100,000 searches of oneworld and Star Alliance fares a month, finds about 29% of them actually bookable. Its guide to what an RTW trip costs sets the two side by side.

Start with the AirTreks trip planner or the sample routes. Our pages on RTW flights and comparing RTW tickets go through the rest.

Tours

Very few companies sell a complete trip around the world, and the ones that do fly you on a private jet.

TCS World Travel has run private jet trips since 1991. Its Around the World by Private Jet takes 52 guests for 25 days in an Airbus A321 fitted with flat beds: Miami, Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Tahiti, the Great Barrier Reef, Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, the Serengeti, Luxor, Cairo and Marrakech. It costs US$175,000 a person, sharing, on the November 2026, February 2027 and October 2027 departures, and $199,000 in 2028.

National Geographic Expeditions sells its own private jet circuit with National Geographic experts along. Our 2016 page on it has the day-by-day. Ask them for current dates and prices.

For comparison, AirTreks puts much the same eleven stops on scheduled economy flights, flying into Cairns for the reef, Delhi for the Taj and Kilimanjaro for the Serengeti, at about $6,650 to $10,144 a person. That is a planning estimate from AirTreks fare history, checked 1 October 2026. Hotels, guides and game drives come on top, and on scheduled airlines the same trip takes a lot longer than 25 days.

If you'd like company for part of the way, Intrepid and G Adventures run small group tours on every continent. Each tour covers one region, but you can join two or three and fly between them on one ticket. More ideas are on our themed tours page.

Matteo Pennacchi went around the world in 1998 with no money and no luggage, and started this site in 2010. Read more about him and the site.