Originally Posted by
tootsiegirl
I was just wondering if anyone knows how fast the Business Class/First Class Reward Tickets get grabbed up from Edmonton, Alberta CANADA to Syndey, Australia. We are wanting to go in July or August of 2012, and were just wondering if they go quickly with it being their winter, or is there a bit of flexability on trying to make sure we can secure tickets. We would also love to go to Perth, but from looking at the aeroplan website, it seems like a very long trip having to go to Bangkok and a couple of more stops, I think it worked out to almost 32 hrs travel time..Yikes. Does anyone out there have a potential routing that would make us a whole lot happier. We don't mind if we have to stay in Sydney a few days first . Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You have a couple of options from YEG to SYD. One is to try and get seats of AC YEG-YVR-SYD. The YVR-SYD flights are very popular and hard to get reward seats on. I would advise you to book your flights when seats are released so 330+ days out. An alternative is to use Air New Zealand via AKL. They run flights out of YVR, SFO and LAX and have comfortable flatbeds in business class similar to AC. You would also be able to fly in or out of lots of other cities with NZ including PER, ADL, MEL, SYD and BNE.
If you really want to go to PER and are concerned about the travel time, consider adding a stopover in Asia (BKK, SIN, NRT or ICN are likely) to experience another country and break up the trip. I think my preferred option would be to use AC or NZ to fly into SYD (or MEL), see what I wanted to on the East Coast and then buy a flight to PER, see PER for a couple of days and then return via Asia with a stopover in BKK or SIN.
Now, after all that, you will save a lot of $$$ if you avoid AC and their fuel surcharges. NZ is particularly good value in this respect and worth the extra stop in AKL. From Asia, consider using OZ or NH. SQ will be basically impossible to get as they now use their 77W and A380 aircraft to North America and they block reward seats on these aircraft.