Well, it is for almost anyone with a halfway decent/steady job.

What I'm saying is that it's kind of impractical for a lot people. I would expect a "contest" like this to have a winning result that was a little more practical from a total travel time perspective, or at the very least have 2 winning options, one for "Total trip time of 2 weeks or less" (granted this might have to be 3 or even 4 weeks if you're going to be spending at least 12 days away anyway) and one for "Lowest cost overall regardless of duration".

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.

At least here in the UK (I know slightly less so in the US, so your mileage may vary) it's extremely common for students who are either between high school / university or just graduated to take a 'gap year', or some other period of time to travel. For them price is clearly a very important factor, and the four months isn't a huge problem!

I'm American and I just got back from 5 weeks backpacking in Southeast Asia. I through my trip was long until I met legions of Brits on gap years...

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.

I'm on month 7 of 12 of doing just this, really enjoying it. About $3500/mo expenses on average (includes my wife and I), mostly in south/southeast Asia (lower cost) but housesitting is making Europe doable on the same budget. Current house even has an LCD to plug into, so I'm back in the warm embrace of vsplits :)

Edit: clarify expenses, not income; so utilization is <100% of a 40HWW.

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.