Here we want to summarize some details that might be helpful in organizing your trip to Asia or any other backpacking adventure.
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Going from Europe to South East Asia and back
Since we want to travel several countries and it didn't matter for us where to start we had a broad choice of flight destinations. The first thing to consider is your time frame. Depending on whether you want to book a round trip or a one way ticket the prices can vary a lot. With most airlines booking a round trip is much cheaper than booking 2 independent flights. Sometimes a one way ticket can nearly be as expensive as a round trip.
If you want to book a roundtrip for a good price (let's say around 500€) you have several options were to start from in Europe and where to go to Asia. Always good are the big airports (London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin,...). Heading to the main tourist destinations like Bangkok for example you should be able to find a roundtrip for around 500€.
In case you do not know when you want to come back (or if you want) you are better of booking a one way ticket. Here your options to catch a cheap flight are much less. For most of the airlines you won't get a single ticket just for half the price of a round trip. When booking our tickets (Oct 2011) the best fares we could find were from Paris to Kuala Lumpur with AirAsia. The cheapest one way ticket including taxes was 220€. As Kuala Lumpur is the main hub for AirAsia most likely you will get the best option from/to this airport. Even though at the moment our return trip is not planned yet, one option is going from Kuala Lumpur to London. Looking around one month or more in advance it is possible to find flights for around 160€ (incl. taxes).
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