Hosted by Phil Keoghan, it featured eleven teams of two, each with a pre-existing relationship, competing in a race around the world to win US$1,000,000.

This season visited five continents and ten countries and traveled over 40,000 miles (64,000 km) during twelve legs.

A new twist introduced in this season includes an expansion of the non-elimination leg penalty where teams also were stripped of possessions excluding their passports and the clothes that they were wearing.

The teams raced through ten countries, five of which were not previously visited on the series: Peru, Chile, Botswana, Turkey, and Jamaica.

This was the first edition of The Amazing Race to not circumnavigate the world by traveling continuously either west or east while crossing each meridian.

In addition to being stripped of all their money and receiving no allowance for the next leg, teams were forced to surrender all of their possessions, except for their passports and the clothes they were wearing, for the remainder of the season.

Controversy surrounded the final leg of the season when Rob & Amber and Uchenna & Joyce arrived at the airport in San Juan.

[1][2] In the "Revisiting the Race" special feature on the season 7 DVD, Uchenna, Rob, and Phil Keoghan denied the accusations of intervention by the production crew.

Phil cited the fact that the decision to reopen the door rested solely with the pilot, and that intervention by the production crew would have resulted in someone leaking such information out.

[3] Ron Young was a former Apache helicopter pilot who was shot down in Iraq and held as a prisoner of war for 22 days, and Kelly McCorkle was a former Miss South Carolina.

[22] Conversely, Linda Holmes of Television Without Pity wrote that it was an "incredibly ungenerous, pinched, unpleasant season" due to it turning "into such a bitchy, moralizing, self-righteous morass, and it's not Rob and Amber who made that happen.