2018 Trip Planning Update 3
Less than three weeks to go! I do not think I can find enough words to express our excitement for this trip. Now I wanted to give you insight on something that I enjoy doing – planning flights, and more specifically which route will we take to Australia? Step inside the world of “How many ways can you fly to Australia?”
Obvious Route
Toronto, like US eastern seaboard cities, Boston, New York and Washington DC, all require a minimum of one stop to the land down under. The most obvious route, and shortest, are westbound routes through any of Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Vancouver where we would connect to the long-haul pacific crossing flight to Sydney.
The downside about this route is apparent when playing with Google Flights – cost! This route is extremely valuable to business class passengers as the flights are positioned to depart late at night, flying almost completely in the dark of night, to land in the morning. Westbound crossing of the International Date Line means a day disappears – flights departing Monday night to arrive Wednesday morning.
Time isn’t our paramount concern, nor only concern – we aren’t spending all our vacation funds on flights. The main criteria was a solid business class product to enjoy, frequent flyer points that could be used for a future flight, reasonable layovers and departure times that would not stretch our circadian rhythms any more than the 14 hour time zone difference between Toronto and Sydney.
Again, I started looking into this early to find out if there were any fare patterns, or specific periods that would make the journey affordable. I spent a lot of time using Google flights, and the ITA Matrix – also owned by Google, searching flight options.
Other Routes
Here are a few other routes we considered:
Japan or South Korea
South Korea and Japan were in the early lead providing the chance for a stopover in locations I’d like to explore. While monitoring fares an ANA error fare came up for Vancouver to Sydney and would have greatly assisted our budget. Sadly I found out about it was corrected. We also started to think “Why spend 12 hours when we can go there on a separate trip?”. And so the search continued.
China
This option was the most appealing due to price. China Southern & China Eastern offered very competitive prices, however upon reading flight reports that included the crew allegedly smoking cigarettes during flights and very long layovers with chaotic transfers, I shied away from these options.
What about other Asia routings?
These were eliminated once odd departure times, or long layovers were discovered or could not be minimized. One example of this scheduling was with Phillippine Airlines. Currently it departs at 2am for a 16 hour flight, followed by a 16 hour layover in Manila and then an overnight flight into Sydney. The stopover in Manila looked like I would be a zombie for the whole day layover.
Eastbound
Many options were available, so let’s sort these based on hub locations.
Middle East
Qatar, Emirates and Etihad all were possible, with Emirates being the popular choice. It offered the ability to have a stopover in Dubai, then continue to either Australia or New Zealand, cross the Tasman Sea and then return. Sadly, these carriers have few direct flights to Canada, and business class fares are rarely on sale.
Europe
Online forums made me consider the possibility of purchasing two tickets: First to Europe, then a second ticket from a European city where the flight to Australia would be inexpensive. Nordic cities came up with consistent cheaper fares than major hubs such as Paris, London or Frankfurt. With the prospect of holding separate tickets this introduced the risk of missed connections, and given the cost and time for this trip, the potential was too great to accept.
Anything is possible
A final option I never considered, and is shorter in distance than our flight is South & West. Latam flies to Auckland, Sydney & Melbourne over the Southern Pacific from Santiago. Getting to Chile is possible both direct and through almost any of the hubs between the two locations.
Google Flights doesn’t search all airlines
One important item to note is that Google Flights does not list all of the possible airlines and routing. This added a wrinkle to my search as the ultimate route I selected never appeared through Google flights.
The winner is…
KLM! The initial KLM flight searches returned codeshares with China Eastern, China Southern, and even Etihad. Although the prices looked okay, once I went onto KLM’s website the Garuda option appeared. Best of all, was that the option was better priced that the original results. How did we choose that a Dutch airline will take us halfway around the world?
This routing would provide us with something each of us will tolerate with a longer flight: Dim Sum lunch for Amber at her favourite asian restaurant The Sea Palace in Amsterdam, and a short visit with my relatives in Germany.