How to travel around the world for less... headache & money...

I was preparing my flight itinerary for next month this afternoon, the usual scouring through Zuji, Travelocity, SQ website, etc comparing prices and finding flight availabilities and chanced upon this very useful tool. This is called the StarAlliance Mileage Calculator and is VERY useful if you fly frequently on any StarAlliance carrier. Basically what I did was to key in my destinations, intended flight timings and the calculator planned out all available flights for me! It even plans out the total mileage you will earn on the entire flight, thus saving me at least 2 hours worth of searching on the Internet.

Now another thing I found out is that it is quite significantly cheaper for you to make two return trips instead of one round the world trip. For example, my recent booking required me to travel outbound from Singapore first to the USA, then Canada, and finally Germany before heading back, all this supposed to be completed within a span of a month and a half. (Yes I do miss home if I am overseas for too long).

What most people would do is to plan one way trips beginning with the originating country, stop by the required destinations along the way, and finally end up back in Singapore after travelling 'around the world'.

A typical route travel map would be as follows:











Now...

What I did notice was I could also make two separate travels, one from Singapore to the USA and Canada, then returning back to Singapore. The Germany trip would then begin a couple of days after that comprising of a return leg to Frankfurt.











Surprisingly, flying this way had the following plus-points:

• Less costly!
• less baggage required on each flight
• MORE mileage! Yeah! :D
• More time with family in between trips