No turning back now, we purchased our around the world airline tickets. We used the Star Alliance airline network so the dates are very flexible. But here is the general outline.
Denver to Frankfurt – June 28th
Istanbul to Dar Es Salam – August 16th
Dar Es Salam to Delhi – September 1st
Kathmandu to Osaka – October 9th
Osaka to Bangkok – October 29th
Bangkok to Singapore – November 29th
Singapore to Denver – December 29th
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Denver to New York City – TBD
New York City to Madrid – TBD
Madrid to Istanbul – TBD
After weeks and weeks of research I ended up discovering a little loophole when purchasing the tickets. If you don’t want to read the specifics of how we saved around four thousand dollars and ended up with a freebie trip to New York and Madrid read no further.
When purchasing the around the world ticket , starting in Denver the ticket costs 13,000 dollars for the two of us. If you move the starting location to Istanbul keeping all stops the same the ticket drops to 9,000 for the both of us. But we still need to get to Istanbul to start the trip off. Thats where a specific credit card comes into play. After searching high and low to find the perfect credit card to use over seas I decided the CHASE Sapphire Preferred Visa was the best one. No annual fee, no overseas surcharges, and 50,000 bonus points when you spend 3 thousand in the first three months. We got two of these cards, one in my name and one in my wife’s name. We used one card to purchase the tickets and the other to purchase a bunch of new gear for the trip. With our bonus points in play we used those to get tickets from Denver to Frankfurt, from there we will make our way to Istanbul and start the around the world ticket getting off the plane in Denver. BUT one requirement for the ticket is that you must start and end in the same country. So we have tickets that go from Denver to Madrid then Madrid to Istanbul that we can use within a calendar year of the first flight out of istanbul. So if you were able to follow all that what it means is that we saved four thousand dollars and got free one way tickets to Spain with a bit of research and careful planning.