We have the flights!

Jeejee!

Hello world, here we come =) After fighting six weeks we managed to buy the flights today. Before telling what we bought and from where, im gonna tell you what NOT to buy and from where.

We started searching the RoundTheWorld flights after Christmas when we were in Finland. Finnair was the first one responding with some kind travel plan and prizes (which was going to be 700e more expensive in the end) so we decided to go on with them. What a mistake! Dont EVER buy RTW-flights from the flying companies directly since they have absolutely no experience how to build them up. Better stick with travel agencies who have no preferences to flying companies and their only job is to find you the best connections, which they do really well.

Well, we thought that since Finnair is part of the OneWorld stuff they must have some nice connections and nice prizing - and techically they do but in practice we were forced to add one continent more to our destinations since they wanted us to have one long-haul connection with Finnair, and that was New York - Helsinki. Why not to go to New York for few days, except adding one continent in the list increased the prize with 500e... Huhhuhh...

Maybe the biggest problem with Finnair was that all the emails we sent, went to the customer care center queue, and in total there was five persons trying to arrange the flights for us. And if you wanted to call to the person and talk about the modifications we wanted, you could call to the call center and from there they absolutely couldnt connect you to the person you wanted to reach. So the people working there trying to arrange the flights have no phone numbers and no personal emails. Thats what they call a good customer care - my ass... With this fancy system we spent four weeks trying to get the destinations and times and prices so that they were ok.

The last drop maybe was that we wanted to fly from Auckland to Santiago de Chile before Rio, and one of the ladies had mixed up SCL with SLC, and suddenly after the tickets were payed, and we saw for the first time the names of the aeroports written open, we noticed that we had a flight from Auckland to Santiago and the next one from Salt Lake City to Rio! We immediately sent an email to the lady telling the mistake (of course not possible to call) and she said that "iiiiits oukei, the codes are just similar (SCL versus SLC) but that our flights are ok". Well, hell no! And then when she finally called us and understood the problem she "corrected" it by making the flights Auckland-Salt Lake City-Rio!

After making all the corrections when we were ready to pay, the credit card company didnt want to accept the second payment done by Finnair, since the pay limit for one day was over already due to the one round of cancelled payment. At this point we decided NOT to take the flights from Finnair and thats it! And this was two days ago..

Some people buy their RTW flights months in advance, we now barely bought them in days advance =) First we contacted Travel Nation and they responded immediately giving personal emails and phone numbers. The girl found nice connections in less than one hour, but the only problem was that we should have had to start our journey from London. And with all this other hassle we decided to contact Kilroy and ask from them. We called there this morning and four hours later we bought the flights - with normal bank transfer and not with Visa =) And this is how they look like:

7.2. Helsinki - London - HongKong (arrive 8th)
12.2. Hongkong - Sydney
14.3. Cairns - Melbourne
17.3. Melbourne - Auckland
24.3. Auckland - Santiago de Chile
5.5. Rio - London - Helsinki (arrive 6th)

The idea is that we will travel in Australia during one month from south to north - from Sydney to Cairns. And during the other month in South America we will travel from west to east - from Santiago to Rio. If someone has some nice travel tips or other must see -things where we should stop during our way then we are definitely interested =)

And finally since the time went so tight, thanks to bloody Finnair, the tickets stopping in Bahrain and Taipei ended up being super expensive. Sorry Sonia and Rheda - we will come and see you latest when you have built up youre house in Tunisia or before that in Paris =) And Jeff, Alissa and the girls - you all we luckily met just at the new year =)

So thats all folks. We have our flights from Paris to Helsinki booked (already before the actual RTW-flights) for next wednesday the 2nd. Due to the travel insurance stuff we have to start our journey from Finland but thats ookoo - then we might have time to see some of you all there.

Now my travel fever is finally rising a bit - or is it the normal fever since i have horrible flu, dont know.. In the middle of the worst circus when arranging the flights we really thought that we should maybe stay just at home. That maybe someone was trying to tell us something. But luckily we didnt give up and le Tour du Monde is about to begin, at last =)

*bisou*