When Abdulla and I started thinking about taking a post-graduation trip, our list of places to go was relatively small; Abdulla wanted to visit Sri Lanka, and I wanted to go to Europe (Italy and Greece in particular). Given that the US, Australia, Sri Lanka, and Europe are spread pretty evenly around the world, we decided it would be best to turn the trip into a round-the-world circuit; I would meet Abdulla in Australia, we’d continue on to Sri Lanka, Europe, and the US, and then Abdulla would go home.

We started looking into round-the-world tickets: tickets that let you fly around the world at a fixed price, with various restrictions on the number of miles, continents, and/or stops. With that in mind, I started adding on to the trip – if we were going around the world and had 15 stops to use, why not use them all? Neither of us were too time pressured, since our start dates at Google were flexible. Since we were going to Sri Lanka, why not India too? We’d have to stop somewhere between Australia and Sri Lanka – why not take a few days in Thailand or Hong Kong?

At the same time, I was skeptical that a round-the-world ticket wasn’t really the right thing for us; they’re far from cheap, and they restrict you to a single airline alliance (this was limiting in some ways: since none of the major airline alliances include any Indian or Sri Lankan airlines, our options in that part of the world were few). So I started investigating alternatives; I came across STA Travel, and sent them a request for a quote. The estimate I got back was a shock – half the price of a round-the-world ticket, with all direct flights.

I went in for a meeting at the STA office in Palo Alto, and started discussing the trip with our travel agent Carley. It was really helpful to talk with someone who had been to many of the places we were going, could suggest tours in places like India and Thailand, and could recommend hotels in places where we would have otherwise been lost in a sea of options. Not only that, but in general the airfare prices for individual legs were at or below what I was able to find on my own; STA has access to student rate tickets, which aren’t available online.

Carley and I started discussing and revising our itinerary – instead of doing both Hong Kong and Thailand, we opted to spend more time in Thailand and take a tour of the rural north. We found a tour of northern India and Nepal, which immediately appealed to me. We added a long (free) layover in Abu Dhabi when going between Nepal and Europe. And we expanded our time in Europe to include everything from Istanbul to southern Spain and Amsterdam. We would have liked to do Germany and Scandinavia too, but we’ll save that for another trip…

After 7 long meetings with Carley, we finally had a trip with all the major logistics planned: 17 flights, 17 countries, a handful of tours, and a mountain of hotels. It was a ton of work planning the trip – and it would have been impossible without Carley – but it was also a ton of fun.