Originally Posted by
3dfx
OP - if purchasing a separate repositioning flight from CHQ to one of the bigger hub cities, can you leave plenty of buffer, e.g. a day so to minimize the risk of unexpected delays? You could adjust your itinerary to do more sightseeing or gift shopping during the last day at the departure city so it's not wasted time.
Side note, I know you didn't ask and my apologies if this is obvious to you - is your family generally well travelled as a group of 5? It's not exactly an easy feat to travel for one month across 4 countries with many train rides and flights involved. Since you appeared to be flying in Y, I would consider optimizing the itinerary and minimizing the number of connections and total trip time for the round trip flight, and just do more repositioning within the EU or AU.
We could do a buffer but my main concern is the off chance something goes wrong and we miss our plane. We could leave 2 days buffer, as it would seem unlikely that something would go wrong 2 days in a row at least, but I'd have to see how everyone else in the trip feels about that. Also originally we wanted to do London, France, Greece then Italy. That way we'd be able to fly from France to Crete, do our thing, then fly back into Italy and have about a week or so there to keep going before we finally left from Rome. This would have been a great amount of buffer if the flight was delayed, or if there was anything else weird there, but getting flights from France to Crete and back to Rome really started adding up quite a bit. We decided to look at flights to BNE from Crete instead of Rome and it's about the same as the previous flights would have been (CNS-LHR, FCO-BNE), but because we'd only need a single ticket from FCO-CHQ, it ends up being quite a bit cheaper. That said, even though it's cheaper it's a lot more complex, so they each have their pros and cons I guess? Ideally we'd have a single ticket that went CNS-LHR, FCO-CHQ, CHQ-BNE but that doesn't seem to exist at a reasonable price! This is where being better at ITA stuff would come in handy I reckon, but I'm going to keep playing with things and see what we can find.
As for the second part, I'm always up to learning new things and whatnot, so no need to apologise for asking! We have travelled before as a group of 5, but nothing to this scale. We've done lots of driving trips within AU, and we've done interstate trips, but I agree that this will be the most amount of flights (and trains) that we'll have gone on. We've been looking into how it all works and what we all need and reading various resources we might need, so that should help with most of it at least. Out of curiosity, what's the go with flying with Y? That's the booking class, right? I didn't think I was on Y, I thought I was in T for most of it? But if there's a way to optimise the flights to get it in a lower fare (which should be cheaper too?), I'd be all for that. Do you have any suggestions? Obviously I suppose I could head back to CNS instead of BNE and fly back once we land? But what other types of repositioning would you recommend within the EU that could optimise this?