Hi everybody,
I'm planning to have a 2 weeks holiday starting from this year Easter holiday.
My plan is to depart from Sydney to Hong Kong (3 days) - San Francisco (5 days) - New York (5 days).
When can I start to make a booking to ensure I get the cheapest flights and hotels?
Where can I find cheapest bargain for this multistop trip?
Your help and answer are much appreciated.
Thanks,
Weird route. You are sort of backtracking which will eat into your two weeks. My advice, ditch HKG (do separately from SYD) and spend the extra days you'll gain in Vegas and/or Florida. This option would be significantly cheaper. It's the HKG that will kill your wallet on your route. Sorry, I'm not much help am I! LOL.
Sparkles is right. You're prob better off going Syd -> HK -> NY -> San Fran -> Syd
This is probably a situation where seeing a travel agent might help you out. I thought I had some mini round the world airfare deals floating around but couldn't find any. I'll post it if I do.
Best I could find was about 3.2K for the route you were after which is a shame as a RTW ticket would prob cost about 2.3 - 2.5k but you would have to go through Europe plus account for the extra travel time.
You should be looking to book ASAP as prices will only be going up from here on in.
Were you happy to transit via HK on the way home? It is a bit out of the way but might be the cheapest way to do your route with a stopover in HK on the way to the US, as Cathay uses HK as its hub. Unfortunately, one way international fares are charged at ridiculous rates (usually more than a return flight). With Cathay you could go SYD-HKG-SFO-HKG-SYD and then catch a few cheap domestic flights in the USA (Virgin America fly SFO-JFK for example).
The other effective way to do this sort of thing is using frequent flyer points but I'm not sure if that's an option for you. Depending on how many points you have, you could fly the SYD-HKG and HKG-SFO legs using frequent flyer points, and use a low cost carrier like V Australia for the one way flight back to SYD.
I had a very similar problem with an open jaw ticket I bought for a very long, weird trip I took around Europe this year. You're honestly best off going to about 3 or 4 travel agents, getting a price from each of them and actually telling them that you're shopping around. I managed to get a bit of money off in the end, AND several of the agents suggested better, cheaper ways of doing the same trip.
I've been through HK over 10 times now though and I've never liked the place, if it were me I'd miss it out entirely ;-)
Sparkle's right about the route too…
Yeah, HKG's OK for a "free" stopover but I'd never head there on purpose. On pondering further I also suggest a Oahu Hawaii stopover. Now THAT was a good stopover.
Thank you all for the information and suggestions. They are very helpful. The reason why I need to stop over in Hong Kong is to visit an old friend there. I will use all your information to do further research. If you guys happened to find any good bargain, please inform me using this thread. Ta
ok, no one has mentioned any prices so i have no clue what pricing were talking about.
for about $2000 incl taxes a few years ago you could get SYD to HK to GERMANY (refuel stopover) to NY (then separate flight to SF at your own extra cost) and SF to SYD. via lufthansa.
How it works is that lufthansa has about 5 really cheap seats on each flight. and if you can secure one of those cheap seats on every connection, you get the cheap price. Otherwise you pay the higher price, even if only one seat is the dearer seat. if this is a good price, book it soon with flight centre or other.
in case not clear - i did syd to tokyo to italy, then barcelona to new york, then san fran to sydney for $1600 plus taxes of about $400. i needed to make my own way from NY to SF.
NOW.