I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to take an around the world trip in just 2 weeks. You'd end up spending the majority of your time on planes and barely being able to enjoy each stop.

Doesn't sound like very much fun to me.

For people who would actually book an around the world trip, 4 months is probably a much more realistic duration.

The contest had a specific set of rules and a 4-month itinerary was permissible within these rules. The point wasn't to create an itinerary that would be advisable for a particular individual, it was to demonstrate that FlightFox is a good tool for finding rock bottom prices, so any set of fair rules would work.

If you were actually making an itinerary for someone, you'd probably have even more pressing questions than trip duration, such as "Where would you like to go?" Do you even want to go 6 continents? :)

Yeah, I was interested until I found that part.

I think for most people, if they could afford 4 months off work then they wouldn't be too concerned about finding the cheapest possible flights.

It's still interesting in a theoretical way, but far less useful than the headline makes it sound.

I can see this working out better for remote workers (like so many of us are). I don't know about other people, but I can pretty easily bring myself down to part time and work on the road -- on planes, in coffee shops around the world, etc. Enough so I can still enjoy the travels and yet make some income while I'm doing it.

Why would you try to visit the entire world if you only have 2 weeks of vacation available? At best you would have time to visit a handful of landmarks per city before getting right back on a plane. That's a complete waste of money.