laura213

I am trying to work out how many miles plus tax it would be for one adult ticket to Sydney in July (leaving on 7th to be specific) can anyone help?

rareair

From?

littlevoices

laura213, amazingly you may find you aren't the first person to have travelled to Sydney. There is a rather useful FAQ at the top of the forum which links to numerous very relevant posts, including a calculator that will give you an approximate cost, and a guide to finding the exact cost to expect.

If you'd like assistance you will need to provide;
> Month
> Airport From, and if you are going to stopover
> Which airline you are planning to fly with (or if you don't know, just say)
> The class of travel
> Is this a redemption with miles... or miles plus cash

Searching the bmi forum for Australia, or New Zealand, should give you numerous recent topics with similar discussions for your consideration.

laura213

Sorry will take a look there
> Month Flying July, 7th if possible
> Airport From, and if you are going to stopover, any London, or any UK not bothered really, not bothered where/when/if stopover
> Which airline you are planning to fly with (or if you don't know, just say) don't know/not bothered
> The class of travel economy
> Is this a redemption with miles... or miles plus cash I have about 90k miles so I'm guessing that means miles plus cash, but don't know

laura213

Okay so it looks like it would be 120k miles, so I could get there if me and OH get a credit card a piece, but I'm afraid I can't work out the tax (mostly cos I don't know what the airport codes are) I've worked out LHR as london heathrow and Sydney as Syd but couldn't see that route on the chart.

Sorry to be a pain but if anyone knows the best way from UK to Sydney (best being cheap to me!) then it would be helpful. I live in Yorkshire so the ideal would be a Manchester flight but I guess it is more likely to be Heathrow or Gatwick

thanks in advance.

orudge

You can take various routes to Australia. Try via Singapore (SIN) or Bangkok (BKK) as an example. You can use http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ to get an idea of the taxes - enter each leg (MAN - SIN, SIN - SYD for instance), ensure you pick the appropriate airline and flight, and see what it says.

In terms of the mileage you need, the mileage charts can be found here, as the sticky says. Z1-Z9 is 100,000 miles, or 50,000 + £340, in economy.

rareair

Do you need to get back too?

If not only 50k miles!

littlevoices

Its probably worth mentioning that using miles for an economy flight will likely turn out to be far more expensive than just buying a sale fare to Australia. In general using your miles for an economy redemption is poor value. Unless you are going 1-way only (i.e. not returning), or wanting to take advantage of a stopover or two (e.g. stopping in Bangkok on the way out, and Singapore on the way back) you will probably find it cheaper to look on flightcentre.co.uk or statravel.co.uk who will give better prices.

For example, if I ignore availability (which may be hard to find), if you did the most direct route, of MAN (Manchester)-SIN (Singapore)-SYD (Sydney) it will cost;
25,000 miles and £170 cash plus £190 of taxes. Turned into a return flight it is 50k miles and a total of ~£690 tax/cash. At the moment on flightcentre.co.uk you can get a return economy fare for £100 less from Manchester on Emirates and save your miles (Not a completely fair comparison as this sale expires at the end of June, but kinda proves my point).

However, if you were to go in business it becomes a lot better value. Doing the above Manchester-Sydney return via Singapore (Note that finding availability on this route will be difficult/impossible due to Singapore Airlines blocking availability for business class on some of these cabins but this is to demonstrate a point) would be;
75,000 miles and approximately £870 of taxes and cash
The cheapest flightcentre fare for business class is £2200 - so a much bigger saving!