Hi,

I'm looking at planning a trip this Christmas to Australia / New Zealand in F/J for the long-haul bits, and whatever works for the rest. I'm having a bit of trouble gluing stuff together and I have a ton of questions which I'm sure at least some other people here must have solved in the past!

1.) I can find a lot of fares in F/J LON->SYD which become so so much more expensive when I try to extend to ZQN. Of course I could just book a separate flight SYD->ZQN but even if both flights are with QF my understanding is that they won't sort me out if the first one is delayed if they're on different bookings? So is it possible to book later and then merge? Or if I book them all on the amex plat / gold / bapp will my travel insurance take care of me if it all goes horribly wrong?
2.) I would love to combine these flights with a oneworld Australia pass but google seems to imply that the only way to find out about it is to call BA / QF and hope you get someone who knows what they're talking about. Does anyone know any good online resources about it? The best I could find was a matrix paste on a thread here a few years back.
3.) And I guess if I booked my international travel and Australia pass separately I couldn't glue them together either for checking baggage through or in the case of things going wrong?
4.) There is one case where the through-fare to ZQN doesn't seem much more than the fare to syd- on QF in first. Matrix says:

However I can't make any online booking engine spit this out with stopovers. Probably because the ZQN->SYD component is in J and the rest is in F and the booking engines seem to want to be told a fare class for the entire flight. Can anyone suggest a good way round this? Booking on expedia (for e.g.) seems to be at least 5 pct cheaper than on QF so I would love to be able to do it online.

5.) The only half-solution I have which matches what I'd like to do is book:
LON->SYD->ZQN
ZQN->SYD->[TASMANIA]
[TASMANIA]->MEL
SYD->LDH
LDH->SYD->LON

where LON->SYD->ZQN, ZQN->SYD and SYD->LON are all from the international ticket and the other bits are domestic Y. But as you can see there are two bits where I'd be connecting to flights on a different booking (ZQN->SYD->[TASMANIA], and LDH->SYD->LON) which I'm reluctant to do in case things go wrong.

Sorry this is pretty encyclopaedic. I know that I could make this a lot simpler by doing a few stop-overs in Sydney but the geek in me is convinced that if I can buy various tickets for various prices I really ought to be able to glue them together and pay the same price!

Cheers,

Paul