Plannage - Flights

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The problem with me saying "lets go to New Zealand for a year, not plan anything & just see what happens" is that I'm just not that kinda girl. I'm a planner. Plus the fact it's been over a year since that was said and who could really resist?!

Budget is tight too, hence the working holiday, so some planning is only sensible (*sigh*).

Flights
Lets play catch up. For anyone wanting to do New Zealand for as little money as possible my advice is this - spend ages looking for flights. I booked our flights in October/November 2010 in the end just before the supposed rise in flight prices. After months of faffing & doing online searches for flights, when the pressure was on - I picked up the phone.

Dedicating a whole morning to the task, I did have another scout around online, on STA Travel, on numerous comparison websites & was getting an average of about £750 each for Dave and I, but of course the flights weren't scheduled as far ahead as May 2012 so I could only search till September. Once I had an idea of what was a good price & what was taking the mick, I started calling round. I called STA first as we are both in their young persons age bracket & are supposed to do a good deal but the absolute best they could do for me was around £748 - a little middle of the road as far as the prices I'd found & when I said I'd found cheaper elsewhere the girl didn;t even make an effort to convince me or do anything about it. She did however, try and sell me a NZ Working Holiday Visa for £110 which was also RIDICULOUS, as direct from Immigration New Zealand they're only £60 (approx). Luckily, I had done my research and was aware of this - when I mentioned it to the STA girl, her reasoning was that Immigration NZ were difficult to deal with and took ages issuing visas. Since I still had 6 months though, I decided to take my chances - but I'll get to that bit later.

ANYway, after STA, I phoned Travelbag who I booked my flights to Australia with in 2007. They came out and £251ish and pretty much hung up the phone straight away when I asked if they could do any better as I'd found cheaper elsewhere...the answer was a no.

A tad more internet scouting revealed little useful from the big players - BA, Qantas, Singapore Airlines etc, then a little advert for Flightcentre came up and I decided to give them a call. I am normally one of those people who steers clear of names I haven't heard of before in case they're dodgy scams or something, & I hadn't heard of Flightcentre, but they looked reputable and had some good prices on the internet search so I gave it a bash. I spoke to a very nice girl called Claire & explained that it was two of us, we wanted to go for a year, but I wasn't sure about how to do the return flights as they weren't available yet. She was very helpful and explained that we'd have to book the return flights for around September and then change them at a later date but that with some airlines this might carry an extra charge. She then did some kind of magic and pulled from her hat flights for £715 each - I was ecstatic and promptly asked how much of a deposit I had to put down only to be informed to my horror that you couldn't pay in bits for flights anymore, had to pay it all up front. I said I'd call her back and promptly phoned Mummy.

It's not that I didn't have enough money saved, it was just all sitting happily in my ISA earning a nice chunk of interest & I didn't want to disturb it. Mummy said I could put it on her credit card & I could pay her back asap. Lovely mummy. Though paying by credit card carried a charge, it was still cheaper than everywhere else & I didn't want to risk losing the cheap flights as the price couldn't be held. So I phoned Claire back with cc in hand only for her to inform me that.... SHE'D FOUND THEM CHEAPER!! Woop woop! £697 each + cc charge=£1420 all in & very happy Alice. Plus, no fee to change return flights with the airline *does a little dance*.

We are flying with Royal Brunei, with one 12hr stop over in Brunei during which we are allowed landside so can have a little explore 😊

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