Route notes
Why this routing works
This 20-week itinerary moves eastbound from Amsterdam, first breaking the Europe-Asia journey with five nights in Dubai before continuing into Southeast and East Asia. The stop lengths are front-loaded for longer stays in Chiang Mai, Da Nang, and Seoul, with shorter city breaks in Bangkok, Singapore, and Taipei between them.
Within Asia, the routing steps north and east in a logical sequence: Thailand first, then Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. That ordering keeps the flying directional rather than doubling back, while spreading the longer-haul sectors across the full trip instead of clustering them together.
Japan is handled as an open-jaw on the ground rather than a return flight: the itinerary flies into Tokyo, reaches Osaka overland, and then resumes by air from Osaka to Seoul. That surface sector removes the need to backtrack to the arrival city before continuing the trip.
The ticket closes with the final long-haul from Seoul back to Amsterdam. In economy, this kind of multi-stop structure works well for a long trip because it combines one-way progression across regions with a single ticketed framework and only one overland gap to manage separately.