In 2022, I set off on a 9 month trip literally around the world (it’s a very lucky life) taking ANA / Star Alliance business class flights at a cost of 125,000 American Express points and $562.95 in taxes and fees versus something like $5,000-$8,000 paying cash. Fast forward to 2025 and I drafted this as I completed the last of 7 flights to wrap up my second RTW adventure (it’s a very, very lucky life), this time at 105,000 points and $1,150.18 in fees.
Since you’ve made your way here, chances are you’re thinking about doing your own Round the World award trip while I am not the travel points expert, after doing this (twice), I do have a few tips on it all. This is my story of how I made my AMEX ANA RTW (say that three times fast) work because this is way too cool a deal not not to share but also not nearly as simple as just dreaming up a plan and clicking buy it now.
Table of Contents
- Why I Picked ANA for My Trip
- How Does the ANA RTW Ticket Work
- Collecting Enough Points for the Ticket
- How I Picked My Route
- How to Book the Actual Ticket with ANA
Let’s be clear, while this post is about saving money on a very cool experience, an award RTW is by no means free, nor are the points free to earn, and unlike cash, you can’t just just pick any ticket you want. This takes time, there can be considerable taxes & fees, it’s frustrating to sort out, and it has limits. But if you’re willing to collect points and put some effort in, it’s an amazing deal.
Why Did I Pick ANA for My Round the World Ticket
My path to an RTW trip was rather simple: a coworker mentioned AMEX points could be used to go around the world in a fancy seat. Naturally, and without knowing anything else or having hardly even flown premium international, I was totally sold on the idea. After a quick bit of research, I earned him a referral bonus signing up for the Amex Platinum Card* and started in on saving up points for my ANA ticket.
* Some links earn me commissions or referral bonuses, this is not one of those links.
Last I checked, all 3 major airline alliances have some form of round-the-world award ticket you can swing but pickings are slim for all the obvious reasons. Even though I usually fly OneWorld via Alaska, I chose ANA and Star Alliance for a few simple reasons:
- Star Alliance goes to a lot of places I wanted to go
- ANA offered a comparatively a flexible RTW ticket in stopovers and ground transfers
- And mainly, ANA came at a cheap number of miles relative to other options
The main drawback I found with ANA was finding flights, both actual availability and the process of searching their site for them. Make no mistake, the process of hunting down award space, especially if you want to sit in Business or First and / or avoid high fee flights, is a pain that’s gotten harder since Covid with all the pent up travel demand. When I first booked this it was for a March 2020 trip (ha!) and things were much easier but hey, such is the price of a great deal.
How does the ANA RTW Ticket Work
ANA’s around the world ticket [see their official page] is based on how many miles you fly and starts at 38,000 points in economy, though I would say you really need 65,000+ points (up to 18,000 flight miles) for a truly extraordinary experience. On top of that will be your taxes and fuel surcharges which ran about $550 for me my first ticket and $1100 my second. Economy flights will cut that down considerably while and some routes and specific airlines will send it way up.
There are of course rules for the ticket that limit how much you can do. See the official ANA site for all the details but here’s the key ones I cared about as of when this was posted:
- You must cross both the Atlantic and the Pacific – easy enough but it does mean ensuring your routing doesn’t take you backwards to get home
- You must travel in one direction: east or west – this requires a bit more planning to ensure you move in a single direction, though they seemed fine with a layover being just slightly off-course
- You can have a max of 8 stopovers (up to 3 in Europe, 4 in Japan) – think of the RTW ticket as your long hauls while you may want your own local flights/trains/cars to get around within a region
- You can have a max of 4 “ground” connections – this is really handy for expanding where you go without having to get yourself back to where you were or burning stopovers
Most important of all, you book the entire ticket in advance and while you can only change flight dates (not routing, not even layover stops for the most part) without canceling the entire ticket. That means being locked in to a route at least most of your dates. That’s not a bad thing but it does mean you’re not able to just roam the world freely like many do on a gap year.
Beyond that, it really is do as you please, provided you can find the seats. To me, this is a steal of a deal when you consider the 60,000-100,000 points it often costs to fly US to Europe, and twice that in business. By mixing big RTW flights with your own shorter local connections, you can really get all over the place, in style, and without racking up a huge airline bill.
Getting Enough Points for an RTW Ticket
Like most of us who are lucky enough to fly regularly but not anywhere own a yacht level lucky, most of my travels, for work or for fun have been in coach. But as is also a common story, all it took was spoiling myself one time to forever sour me on cramming into a seat for longhaul trips.
When I decided to pursue an RTW trip, it felt like a once in a lifetime (ok, twice in a lifetime, my second trip being shorter and inspired by a layoff), quit work and go all over plan and so of course, I wanted to do it as enjoyably and honestly, as fun as I could. For that, I figured I would fly somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 miles, meaning I needed 115,000-145,000 AMEX points, plus cash for the taxes and fuel charges. Obviously this is not backpacking it budget stuff but for a half dozen flights in premium seats, it is damn cheap.
The first big start I leveraged was the AMEX sign up bonus*. When I joined, it was all of 50,000 points but these days I’ve seen offers for 80,000 – 100,000 points and even up to 150,000 on a business card, with a hefty minimum spend. If you can make one of those work, it’s almost enough to get a off that bonus alone.
Even if you don’t want the Amex Platinum with its hefty $695 annual fee (I guess I can discuss that at another time but sufficient to say, while it’s been expensive, between traveling regularly and other perks, I’ve justified paying the annual fee since 2018), there are plenty of other Amex cards with 40,000 – 60,000 point bonuses to get you started.
There are a lot of good ways to speed up collecting more points on top of that bonus beyond just 1:1 spending.
- Referrals can earn 10,000-20,000 points per card
- Second cards for authorized users get another 10,000 for $200
- AMEX shopping rewards can have bonuses of 100s to 1,000’s of points for relatively low spend
- Plus, you get 5 points per $1 on direct flight bookings with airlines and a handful of other multipliers to help things along
- Other point earning Amex cards can have bigger earnings too, if you really want to game points
Between the welcome offer, some of the bonuses / retention bonuses, and many of my typical charged expenses going to my AMEX for a long while (sorry points people, I’m sure I missed out on some better value for grocery or restaurant spending but I’m not that level of optimizer), I was able to reach 125,000 points without making any giant purchases and do it again over a few more years.
How I picked my route
Saving up tens of thousands of points only to try and book as far out as possible to get a good seat meant waiting in a way I have never waited for a trip before. Significant delayed gratification for sure. But that also meant so much time to dream up and then plan out something amazing.
Of course, I knew a few major places I wanted to get to, so that gave me a foundation to cross the globe with. Your travel goals may differ a lot from mine but here’s some of the things I was thinking having “only” been to a handful of countries before this adventure:
- See a lot but also to land and go without too many visa / critical logistics in the way, knowing I had limited international travel experience and would be moving around fast and take on a lot of various rules.
- Avoid overdoing it on miles bouncing too far north and south given the number of points I had available and the difficulty of finding truly long flights.
- Get to places when the weather was cooler (as best I could) as that generally meant less crowded, less expensive, and a lot more comfortable for me running around all day.
- Keep the clothing / gear I would need as consistent as I could to avoid having to pack a ton or re-shop for big ticket items.
Perhaps most importantly, I had to consider where I could get award seats too of course.
So I dotted out the stuff I knew, endlessly chatted with friends, read my favorite blogs, and snooped back into likeminded Instagram profiles, all while darting back and forth to the ANA website to confirm if a flight was possible at all. I spent a long time just plotting things before actually moving and then weeks to confirm if a flight was possible at all. I probably spent 3 months planning and changing things before flights opened up to book it all.
How to book your own round the world award ticket
In theory, the booking process is simple: (1) plan your route, (2) transfer your miles, (3) find your exactly flights, (4) call ANA, tell them the details, (5) pay the taxes & fees and you’ve got an amazing ticket booked.
This is the process but the reality of doing it is far more complex than it sounds.
Obviously the first hurtle is just figuring out where you want to go. I discussed that just before but it is key since you have to pre-plan your trip and can’t change routings once you takeoff.
Next, it’s always taken around 4 days for me to transfer points from AMEX to ANA, so either you wait till the last minute and the flights you find may be gone or you just have to live with a risk of having moved points that you can’t move back. But ANA awards are often great deals so just do it.
The easiest time to get space for good seats is when they first open.
Award seats generally open 10-12 months in advance as this fantastic chart from Reddit shows. Obviously calling the day a seat releases is ideal as many flights get just one or two premium spots. But that’s a long way out to book a trip and as an RTW will span weeks if not months, you do have to wait till the entire trip is bookable.
I was able to book my first trip about ~6 months out and my second less than 3. But that did mean being rather flexible on my routing and being willing to pay more taxes to get whatever was available. If you’re not being such a snob and fly economy (no, you can’t mix Economy Plus with Business), odds are much better to get exactly where you want to go within just a few days of when you want to go there.
Last minute availability can also pan out, either upgrading from Economy to Business or just booking in the first place, though it’s certainly not certain. On my second RTW trip, I actually rebooked just a few weeks before departure as better flights opened for my hard to find US -> Asia segments while my easier segments around Europe thankfully remained available. I also changed my final flight return date twice to push back my trip and for that reason, highly suggest sticking to easier routings on anything you might change. It’s much easier to find LHR to EWR and fly on from there than LHR to LAX for example.
- ANA’s website is rough, slow, and never hit the back button: There is no RTW builder and no great tool on the ANA website to search out options but there is a handy multi-city feature that helps see exactly what is open on a given route that qualifies for RTW.
- To combat this, start with Seats.areo and other availability tools. While not perfect, Seats.areo made booking my second RTW leaps and bounds easier than the first. Their pro search tools let you look up ranges of airports and dates to find that one routing that works
- Take advantage of Seats.aero alerts to avoid (some) manual work. Just understand that if a flight isn’t open day after day, chances are you are not the only person likely hunting for a spot and so if a seat does open in a hard to find segment, move fast or someone else will.
- Once you do have your flights, run them all through the ANA multi-city tool one last time to confirm the route. Nothing is more frustrating than sitting on hold only to find out you can’t get your seats because something changed. Personally, I like to double check again and again as I am on hold.
- Everything is booked over the phone. There is no website to confirm this ticket but the ANA agents are great in getting it done. Just be ready with your flights, dates, and points and it goes quick. The agents may help check a segment or two, but don’t expect them to go hunting for the entire trip for you.
- Once it’s all set, they’ll get you an estimate of taxes & fees but the fares team actually books the ticket a few hours later.
I suppose if it was even a slightly easy one to redeem, there wouldn’t be a single seat available. Booking isn’t easy but you can make it work.
Tips for booking your ticket
I really suggest using ground transfers to build in your own side-trips and routings around a core of longhaul flights instead of thinking ANA for everything. On my first trip, I landed in Brussels one month and spent the next few bouncing all around Europe via train before continuing on via Athens. Much nicer than having to backtrack and it meant I could look for any airport East of Belgium to fly on from, instead of having to find BRU -> IST.
Don’t make things harder than you need to. The fancier the seats, the more peak time your trip is, and the more direct of a route, the harder it all gets to find space. Flexibility is key whether it’s the airports (on my second trip, I ended up with a week in India because that’s how I found routing out of Kathmandu and had a wonderful visit of the Taj Mahal as a result), the exact dates (I ended up in Australia twice as long as I planned, and got to enjoy far more as a result), or just accepting a lower class seat sometimes (I flew economy EWR to KEF which was the only option I could find but that in turn saved myself hundreds in fuel surcharges).
To guestimate taxes & fees, I would run my flights through the multi-city tool as if they were round-trip. Technically United’s website, the star alliance RTW site, or Seats.aero should have this but I find ANA rates to differ and while not perfect, it gave me a good direction, saving me from picking a very spendy Swiss Air flight for a much cheaper United one.
When it comes to time to book, have airport code pairings with airlines and flight numbers makes your call radically easier which means it goes faster and so less chance of someone else getting that seat. For example, “UA 1234 from LHR to ADD on December 1st, at 10:05 AM” versus “London to Addis Ababa on the 1st”.
Finally, take as much time as you can, on the trip that is. I know this is obvious and like, money, family, responsibilities but with such a trip of possibilities, even a few more days can mean so much. And, save you from having to try to extend or fly right on back after the trip (ask me how I know).
Prepare to get addicted
My RTW trips have been amazing, obviously. Some things I did so, so right, some things I messed up a bit, and some were just necessary adjustments, but it worked out and then some to make for one hell of an adventure. Certainly never expected to get to do it again, even if waaaay shorter, but once I had that first adventure, it turned out any excuse was excuse enough to figure it out.
If you book your own, please leave a comment and share!
