Holidays, and airfare madness

As people who know me know, I am pretty busy at the moment juggling two projects for PATREC. Also, if everything goes well, I'll be off to Brisbane at Christmas/New Year for a new job. I really need a decent holiday, and luckily there is a short period of about 2 weeks in mid September that I should be able to squeeze some time out.

After a lot of hum-ing and hah-ing I finally decided that I would like to spend a week in San Francisco, and since I have so little time, and it is so far away, I also decided that I would splurge a little and fly business class.

Now, from the West coast of Australia (Perth) to the US there are really only two sensible travel options: fly Qantas to Sydney and then onto San Francisco, or fly Air New Zealand to Auckland and transfer there for a flight onto S.F.

On neither of these is the fare exactly cheap. In both cases I was looking at something in the vicinity of 11 to 12 thousand dollars. I looked at flying via Asia, but this turned out to be more complicated and even more expensive. The only city in Asia that I would really like to visit at the moment anyway is Tokyo.

So I started looking around a bit and at a whim checked out some of the "round the world" prices at Bestflights.com.au. It turns out that a basic round the world business class airfare on either Star Alliance or OneWorld can be got for something in the vicinity of $9,000 - a good $2000 cheaper than my PER-SFO ticket would be. Even more amazingly, it appears that there is a fare available that would give me PER-TYO-HEL-LON-SFO-SYD-PER for around $7000.

So there you have it. By combining a few destinations I would like to visit, rather than just picking one of them I can save 40%!

I have confirmed with Bestflights that this fare is valid. Unless I hear bad news from my project manager today, I will try booking it tonight.