New App Simplifies Round-The-World Travel

Ever toyed with the idea of taking a few months off, booking a round-the-world ticket, and getting the hell out of town? You know, one of those bucket list trips where you hop, skip and jump between countries and climates, allowing you to surf Tahiti's Teahupoʻo one week, ski tour Switzerland's Haute Route the next week and then, miraculously, climb Kilimanjaro the week after that. Did your imagination falter—another time, Myanmar!—when you considered the cost and logistical headache of booking your flights?

Good news: indie travel guide BootsnAll just launched their beta-tested webapp Indie this week, enabling armchair dreamers to play with itineraries all day long, and even book tickets, too.

And the best part? With the right parameters, the app's results can be shockingly cheap, as BootsnAll demonstrates with five sample itineraries. One ten-stop example, bookended by St. Louis and taking a single traveler on a 3-and-a-half month springtime trip to Southeast Asia, China, Europe, NYC and Chicago, turned out to be $3,258. (The trip was $3,338 when I plugged it in today.)

For comparison's sake, I attempted to price out the same itinerary using Star Alliance's round-the-world app (initial estimate: $7,044) and maxed out the number of allowable segments (16) before conceding defeat.

The site suggests several tips for potential travelers on how to add extra cities at little extra cost, tweaking dates for further savings, and booking overland segments—all of which are easy to do.

Give it a whirl, take an ethical vacation, and let Indie do the hard work.