Hello OzBargain folks. First time poster here. This is a "help me find a bargain" post, except it's time critical.
I need to fly the missus from London to Sydney (return) over the peak travel season, flying out 12-14 December and flying back 2-4 January. We didn't really know she'd be able to come back over the month-long European holiday season, hence the last minute flight buy. I've looked on all the major flight aggregators (Skyscanner, Last Minute, Kayak, Adioso) as well as several airline websites - what I'm getting is mostly around the $3000 mark.
Can I do any better than this? Does anyone on OzB have experience buying flights in peak times? Like a good OzBargainer, I have been perfecting the bonus QFF points thru credit cards technique, however in this case it doesn't help as all Qantas classic award seats are gone, and I don't have enough points for the anyseat award. I feel like I should either get a friend who's a travel agent, or learn programming and develop an algorithm to find cheap flights and send alerts. Perhaps something like that already exists. Perhaps it's called OzBargain. Perhaps that's why I'm here.
Help me all you Obi Wan Kenobis, you're my only hope!
Your cheapest option would probably be to go Air Asia to KL or Scoot to Singapore and then pick up a flight from there, either return on the same airline or mixing and matching for the cheapest fare. Air Asia is showing 399 on the way there and 403 back on the days you need, Scoot is 519 to Singapore on the 12th and 259 back on Jan 2. Jetstar are 452 Syd to Singapore on the 12th (cheaper the two preceding days) but mix 600s for a flight back… Lots of combos with Singapore, Malaysian and the middle eastern carriers from KL and Singapore to the UK and Europe.
You might need to spend a night at the airport hotel to be on the safe side in case of delays, but it's usually much cheaper to pick up a flight to Europe from Asia. It's generally cheaper to fly into Paris too (less airport tax) so if she would be okay with getting the Eurostar across to London that would save a bit more too.
If you're willing to also include a domestic hop down to Melbourne, Royal Brunei has flights Melbourne to London for 2300-2800 in those dates. They're flying in the new Dreamliner (we're flying with them in March) which is supposed to be good.
Otherwise if you don't want to do all the searching yourself, I've heard excellent things about FlightFox - https://flightfox.com