I’ll start with the actual cost of flying around the globe three times, of renting cars and taking trains, ferries and busses.
I have already written about the actual ticket hunting and booking processes of my three circumventions of the globe, but here’s the final tally:
Besides spending 360.000 miles on my two Round-the-world tickets, and another 40.000 miles for the flights home from Buenos Aires, I paid:
- 6526 Euro on flight tickets for the 46 flights (actually 7126 Euro, but Lufthansa had rewarded me 600 Euro for taking a later flight to Rio)
- 1397 Euro on 5 rental cars
- 838 Euro on trains (notably the Japan Rail pass and crossing the Australian desert)
- 515 on visa cost (and cancelling the trip to China)
- 400 Euro on gas and tolls for the cars
- 321 Euro on 6 ferries
I left out the cost for new shoes when I walked a hole into the old ones.
In total, traveling 185.600 kilometers cost 9995 Euro, or just over 5 cent per kilometer. Quite cheap, come to think of it.
Having saved all those miles of course greatly brought the cost down.
As a rough estimate, all the plane tickets would have cost – I’m making an estimated guess here as there’s no way to tell for sure – some 7000 Euro more, without using my miles.
I am extrapolating this from what the Star Alliance website showed me as a final price for the RTW-tickets, before I called the Lufthansa office to actually make the booking, where we changed some dates and itineraries, hence changing the cost.