After hours more searching on the Internet I am fast thinking that there is a Travel Agency conspiracy against anyone hoping to follow the noble idea of travelling around the world in any kind of progressive order that does not run very similarly with the classic "U.K. > U.S.A. > Australia > Hong Kong > U.K." route.
No matter which website I use, be it from a specific airline or a generic travel agent search engine, the answers invariably keep coming back the same, if you want to go to anywhere exotic or out of the way then be prepared to pay an arm and a leg and heaven forbid that you even dream you will go from there to anywhere else except back to where you came from unless your a multi millionaire.
I will not even begin to say how irritating it is to have to laboriously task through seven almost idential flight searches from one location to the next, as flight costs often can vary drastically from one day to the next, even when you are talking nine months away.
Nor need I relate in full detail how much time is taken up by switching from a myriad of major airports of both the source and destination country to try and find a cheaper alternative to the first price shown.
What baffles me more is that almost without exception it is cheaper to buy a return ticket to somewhere and then once you return home to fly out again to a new destination than is is to fly from one destination to the next. Certainly this is the case with Tenerife and Brazil.
Despite Tenerife being almost half way between the U.K. and Brazil it is much cheaper to buy a return ticket to Tenerife and then a single to Rio De Janeiro than it is to attempt to use Tenerife as a stop over between the one and the other.
However what I found to be complete lunacy is that when you try to book a flight to Rio De Janeiro the sites and airlines show a two leg journey changing planes at Porto in Portugal. Now although the cost of a single flight from London to Porto is very cheap, the cost of a single flight from Porto to Rio is more than the cost of an entire flight from London to Rio using Porto as just a stop over.
How can it be more expensive to buy just one leg of a journey than it is to buy both legs of the same journey in one go!
It reminds me of the advice that a good friend of mine gave me about flying to Singapore. He said that it was cheaper to contact a Malaysian travel agent and buy a return ticket from Singapore to London and then use the return leg to fly out there, than it was to contact a UK based travel agent and buy a single ticket from the UK to Singapore.
'Frustrating' ... 'illogical' ... 'insane' ... 'warped' ... 'chaotic' ... 'complex' ... there are many words that you could use to describe the travel industry but personally 'straight forward' would never be one I would chose to use, unless used with the prefix or 'not'.
Thus it is, that despite my prior hopes of completing an always progressive route around the world, I am fast thinking that perhaps it will be cheaper to simply make a list of all the places that I really want that are not in the middle of nowhere and just have fun in visiting them all in no specific order.
When I first laid out my route a friend commented that it must have taken me many hundreds of man hours to work it all out and I foolishly boasted that I had completed it in just a few hours. Oh, how the pride comes before the fall. I fear that a hundred man hours will be the very least it will take me to fashion a viable route around the world.
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