flights Europe to Australia
 

Any suggestions please on cheapest flights from Europe to Australia? From Ireland we can occasionally get great deals to other parts of Europe. Would anywhere in southern Europe be a good starting point for Australia? I ask because last year when I used kayak.com to find cheapest flights from Dublin to Toronto, it didn't tell me that I could use 2 budget airlines: Aer Lingus or Ryanair to uk and then Air Transat from uk (Gatwick or Manchester, depending on their schedule) to Toronto, which was cheaper than any through ticket I found on kayak. (And it's much easier for us to change in UK rather than in US; most kayak flights were via Chicago). Kayak doesn't show all the airlines. Kayak seems very powerful, but does any other flight search engine include budget airlines?

I'm thinking that the cheapest flights from Europe to Oz are probably from the UK due to demand, but if any of you have any suggestions I'd be happy to look into them. It's not for me, it's for a single woman, going to visit her daughter & son-in-law who have recently moved there, near Cairns, about March-April, staying 2 months. Cheapest kayak gives is about €1159 with BA/Quantas. (32 hours) (usually via London, Changi & Brisbane) Is that a good price? Might it come down, or should she book it soon? Another option is Etihad, but they take 40 hours, via Abu Dhabi & Kingsford Smith. Thanks everyone!

Have a look at KLM maybe? They have fares to Brisbane for around €1270 depending on the exact dates flown. Aer Lingus and Ryanair have flights to Amsterdam. I'd choose Aer Lingus of the two, just for timekeeping.

Or consider a RTW ticket - they can work out cheaper I believe.

Qantas - http://www.qantas.com has a reasonable schedule linking up with BMI out of Belfast to Heathrow; Qantas to Singapore and Jetstar (budget subsidiary of Qantas) to Cairns.
I'm in Australia and can't get on the UK Qantas site to check prices but the Australia-Belfast price for 1 adult with a 7 March departure & 23 April return is AUD 2715.

You may well be able to get better Ireland - LHR prices. And I was only able to get Belfast on the QF website from here.

Somewhere to start though, and it's QAntas (no "U"). (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services)

Virgin also flies LHR to Sydney and Sydney to Cairns, so that may also be worth investigating.

I should have added - the QF schedule is about 29 hours, which seems a better deal than the mid 30's.

Thanks for the tips. I tried quantas.com & it immediately put me to qantas.com, so it must expect folk like me to mis-spell their name, but thanks for that. From there I found it says "Flights from Europe"(Change); click on that & you can change it to wherever you want. Found Cathay Pacific do good deals via Hong Kong as well. Thanks to all for the other tips. On kayak some BA flights are operated by qantas, but it appears to offer the very same flights at different prices. I noticed this before last year with Dublin-Toronto; booking the very same flights with bmi was a different price to Air Canada on codeshare arrangements.

Hi Ricardo,
For our recent trip from LHR to Sydney we used Qantas/BA code share. We did this to keep the flights as direct as possible with minimum delays. Stopping over for a few nights en route in Asia really breaks up the flight and allowed us to see some great places as well as our destination.

Currently the flights to Cairns Via Singapore booked in the same manner are showing as around £950, but multi city route LHR-Sing-Cairns-Sing-LHR with a couple of nights stop off at Sing both ways is £1005.

Its always worth monitoring the fares. These prices are not flexible though.

This is the site I used,
http://www.qantas.com.au/travel/airl...arch/global/en

Hope it works.

Good luck

Muck

Bokhara2 you can look at the Uk site from Australia. I have use dit to book aticket from London and live in OZ. Just next to flights there is a line change and you xlick on it and it will tak eyou to many other country sites.

Thanks Northie. With me & tech stuff, it's mostly "operator error" ;)

Thanks Muck, that qantas site opens up lots of possibilities, I hadn't come across that one before