As a kid, I was lucky that both of my parents were teachers so we were able to travel during the summers. As we got older, we were able to go further away, leading up to our first trip abroad to England. After that, I was lucky enough to go on several more trips to Europe and Australia. So as soon as I had the opportunity, I was lucky enough to be able to pay my parents back by booking them the “Trip of a Lifetime”.

The Trip

Thanks to some great bloggers like Ricky at the  Prince of Travel and Jaycee at Points Nerd, I was able to understand how to use points to book my parents, who had never been in business class before, a trip around the world in business class for less than $1000 CAD.

I think my parents were shocked at how I managed to do this when I told them that they would get to eat chocolate in Zurich, see the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal - and that was all within the first 4 days of their trip!
We started with the first destination on their bucket list, the Taj Mahal, and quickly expanded the list to include the Great Wall of China, Uluru, and Rio de Janeiro. Over 76,271 kms (or 47,393 miles for our American readers), here is the final itinerary.

We added a few more flights during their stops using Avios points and cash, but over 6 weeks they went to every inhabited continent for less than $2500! Their total trip looked like this.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to detail the planning of this trip and some tips on how to book your own. Subscribe to my newsletter here to follow updates on how we booked this flight!

Note: I did this again for another trip in 2020!