Bromley86
13th September 2007, 12:34 AM
We booked our flights yesterday (more on that at the end). So now we have 20 nights to recce and a stopover to see relatives in HK.
We're concentrating on the Auckland area, as that is where we'll be based for the first 10 years or so. As we're coming from a village, the assumption is that if we can put up with city life then we'll love the rural.
I'm a details person, so we're intending to stay 2-3 days in various locations to see what they're like, what the commute to the CBD is like, etc. Can't wait for the Waiheke commute, not so thrilled at the thought of the harbour bridge one.
Obviously I'll search the web, but does anyone have any suggestions for short stay SC web sites?
Searching for Flights - UK to NZ
My experience, in case it's useful.
I started with online search sites. However, we had very flexible departure times (i.e. somewhere between Jan and March), so we should have made the agents work for us. Call DialAFlight, Travelbag and ebookers to get them to do the donkey work of finding out which dates are cheapest. I actually enjoyed trying to do it myself, but I'm perverse - their systems are much better suited to it than what is available online.
If you have fixed dates then you can hit the websites. However, it might be worth calling them anyway as there are situations where they can massage your plans to get cheaper fares. Also it's worth confirming what they tell you over the phone on their website, as I had an ebooker advisor misquote by £200 as he'd chosen an expensive flight for one of the legs.
It may be cheaper to book online rather than over the phone (i.e. ebookers charge £10 per person if you book over the phone). You can get this waived by acting dumb - I did without even meaning to :) . Likewise I actually stopped the booking process with DialAFlight and Travelbag when they hit me with a service charge for using a credit card as I was sure that ebookers didn't. It turned out they did but will waive it if you say you don't want to pay it (I'm a latecomer to "If you don't ask, you don't get", but it really works).
The reason why I hesitated to use ebookers in the first place (they were the cheapest) was that the other two said that they could see which seats were free on the seat map and therefore request (i.e. it's not guaranteed) the ones that you'd prefer. ebookers gave mixed signals, first saying that they could and then that they couldn't. When I found out about the credit card charge at the others that bumped the price difference up to £80, so I was willing to chance that ebookers couldn't book the seats (they could).
A word on call centres. DialAFlight and Travelbag are UK based but ebookers is Indian. I grew up with Indians, so I have little trouble understanding them, however I know that my wife would not have been able to. Likewise, "Vince" (nice touch anglicising names :) ) had terrible trouble with my accent, so much so that we were still correcting surnames after spelling them out alpha-bravo-charlie twice. No errors in the booking though - they are pretty careful to make sure they get it right.
The price: £689.30 pp, travelling Cathay 18 Feb to 13 Mar. Would have liked to go ANZ for the extra legroom, but it was going to cost £100 per person per inch :D .
Useful sites:
Seat pitch (layman: legroom) and map http://www.seatguru.com/index.php
We're concentrating on the Auckland area, as that is where we'll be based for the first 10 years or so. As we're coming from a village, the assumption is that if we can put up with city life then we'll love the rural.
I'm a details person, so we're intending to stay 2-3 days in various locations to see what they're like, what the commute to the CBD is like, etc. Can't wait for the Waiheke commute, not so thrilled at the thought of the harbour bridge one.
Obviously I'll search the web, but does anyone have any suggestions for short stay SC web sites?
Searching for Flights - UK to NZ
My experience, in case it's useful.
I started with online search sites. However, we had very flexible departure times (i.e. somewhere between Jan and March), so we should have made the agents work for us. Call DialAFlight, Travelbag and ebookers to get them to do the donkey work of finding out which dates are cheapest. I actually enjoyed trying to do it myself, but I'm perverse - their systems are much better suited to it than what is available online.
If you have fixed dates then you can hit the websites. However, it might be worth calling them anyway as there are situations where they can massage your plans to get cheaper fares. Also it's worth confirming what they tell you over the phone on their website, as I had an ebooker advisor misquote by £200 as he'd chosen an expensive flight for one of the legs.
It may be cheaper to book online rather than over the phone (i.e. ebookers charge £10 per person if you book over the phone). You can get this waived by acting dumb - I did without even meaning to :) . Likewise I actually stopped the booking process with DialAFlight and Travelbag when they hit me with a service charge for using a credit card as I was sure that ebookers didn't. It turned out they did but will waive it if you say you don't want to pay it (I'm a latecomer to "If you don't ask, you don't get", but it really works).
The reason why I hesitated to use ebookers in the first place (they were the cheapest) was that the other two said that they could see which seats were free on the seat map and therefore request (i.e. it's not guaranteed) the ones that you'd prefer. ebookers gave mixed signals, first saying that they could and then that they couldn't. When I found out about the credit card charge at the others that bumped the price difference up to £80, so I was willing to chance that ebookers couldn't book the seats (they could).
A word on call centres. DialAFlight and Travelbag are UK based but ebookers is Indian. I grew up with Indians, so I have little trouble understanding them, however I know that my wife would not have been able to. Likewise, "Vince" (nice touch anglicising names :) ) had terrible trouble with my accent, so much so that we were still correcting surnames after spelling them out alpha-bravo-charlie twice. No errors in the booking though - they are pretty careful to make sure they get it right.
The price: £689.30 pp, travelling Cathay 18 Feb to 13 Mar. Would have liked to go ANZ for the extra legroom, but it was going to cost £100 per person per inch :D .
Useful sites:
Seat pitch (layman: legroom) and map http://www.seatguru.com/index.php