8 hours and 45 minutes flight from Istanbul to Bangkok. (Starting 8pm, and arriving at 9am with the time difference.) That’s 3 to 4 movies or some good night sleep for others, but this time I wasn’t able to fully enjoy any of those. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the kids.
They did their best, what a 3 & 5 year old possibly can. It was more about the narrow & uncomfortable seats, painful earbuds & the lady behind me who kept on tossing, turning and mumbling while trying to do, what majority of the people do, during the night.
So in the end, I ate the whole night sandwiches that our dear neighbor had packed for kids, while adjusting my seat. Organized kid’s feet and blankets. And those damn buds in my ear. I didn’t see any of the movies fully and got only 20 minutes of sweet unconsciousness, but I’m positive that after couple of months, I will master the plane rides better.
Nevertheless, the best thing about ending this flight was to be welcomed in a friendly home in this unfamiliar and wrong side driving country. Being taken care of, eating good food, having good company, and getting enough time to rest and recover was all we could wish for… Thank you Basak & Alp for that!
If you are interested to do an around the world trip, I would like to share some information about our tickets. When we started to plan our trip, we did some initial research and ended up with three different options.
1. Buying individual tickets while on the way: Would let us travel freely based on our feelings and budget, but a bit too loose for us since we need 4 tickets per ride and the route & schedule was partly planned beforehand.
2. Using Bootsnall flight ticket service: Search tool & personal service which allowed us to search & pick the cheapest flights available. It felt as a good idea and for sure works for some travelers, but… all tickets from individual airlines meant no flight bonuses and usual fees when changing the flight times just felt a bit of waste.
3. Using One World’s or Star Alliance‘s round the world ticket packages: Overall prices are competitive and in our case cheaper than for example through Bootsnall. Enables us to collect flight bonuses from the whole ride and, at least in theory, gives us the possibility to change flight times with out extra costs. You just need to fly all around the globe, in one direction either East or West.
Just to give you an idea, our current flight package includes tickets from Istanbul – Bangkok – Chiang Mai – Sydney – Auckland – Los angeles – Istanbul and we paid less than 2500€ / person for all of these flights. Not bad at all, thinking we are flying around the globe and some of the flights are really long distances between continents.
But to be honest changing the tickets, might be more difficult than promoted. It is quite clearly informed, that changing the flight with out extra costs requires free seats in exactly same class. This means that you need to wait for next available flight (and you are not necessarily the only one in line). Or then you end up using some money to change the class. What wasn’t told in star Alliance website, was the complexity of doing the change and the fact that in some of the cases you are not able to make some regular procedures online.
In our case the Star Alliance ticket is officially purchased from Lufthansa and this limited our possibility to make online check in for Turkish Airlines flight, because the differences in booking numbers. Also changing some of the flight would require us to go physically to a sales office which could be a unnecessary hassle too. So the possibility of changing the flight is handy, but only in circumstances where you really are willing to put the effort…
4 bags of clothes 