Today marks the day that Brad and I will embark on another round the world journey!
This is by far the biggest trip we’ve ever put together and will span approximately four weeks to cover over 47,000 miles (almost 2X the circumference of the Earth)! It’s been a while since we took our last trip since we’ve had to save up enough time to be able to take this much time off work. So my travel skills feel a little bit rusty.
This is also the longest we’ve ever waited for a trip to come around. We booked many of these segments about a year in advance and started to rack up miles and points many months before we started booking anything.
The itinerary
I don’t like to put my specific travel itineraries out there in the interwebs until after I finish up trips due to there being too many weirdos out there and to not spoil the fun.
However, some of the hot spots include: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Auckland, London, Paris, Rome, New York, and the Maldives. Almost every single hotel room in these cities was booked with points and we’ll be staying at a lot of different hotel chains including Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, SPG, Hyatt, and IHG but not every hotel will be with a major hotel chain.
We’ll be in some of these locations for three to four nights while others will only be one to two night stays.
The airlines
This trip is also very much about trying out experiencing different types of premium cabins.
Some of the first class cabins that we’ll be trying out are Korean Air, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, Etihad, Qatar, and Emirates. We’ll also be flying on some great business class cabins like those for Cathay Pacific, Virgin Australia, and Virgin Atlantic.
I’m incredibly excited for this mega-trip and slightly nervous given how many moving pieces there are. Since we planned this trip and started putting it together, a lot of changes took place. We had to deal with a number of devaluations, route changes, aircraft swaps, and other unexpected hiccups that made putting together this specific line-up of airlines extremely difficult.
Then there were other forces we had to deal with like Hurricane Harvey, which almost made it impossible for Brad to earn enough time to take off for us to be able to take this trip (not to mention the chaos that it brought to us and so many people around us). And then there were other scares like a last minute computer crash that made preparing for this trip incredibly stressful.
In short, it’s been a year of patiently waiting with high anticipation for this day and I’m absolutely stoked that it’s here.
Follow along on Instagram!
I’ll be trying to keep up posting as much as possible but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep up to my usual schedule.
If you want to follow along with the round the world trip then head over to my instagram page: @uponarriving. I’m going to try to step up my photography game for this trip and also incorporate more video when possible so I should be able to put out some interesting content.
Wish us luck on the trip and hopefully everything goes (mostly) smoothly!
Daniel Gillaspia is the Founder of UponArriving.com and the credit card app, WalletFlo. He is a former attorney turned travel expert covering destinations along with TSA, airline, and hotel policies. Since 2014, his content has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNBC. Read my bio.
Safe travels and have fun!! I really enjoy reading your posts.