EK First Fare Question - LON - Australia (anything lower than £7.1k)
 

It's a while since I posted, but here goes! Fares from London to Australia (Perth, maybe open jaw Perth/Sydney) in First seem stubbornly high at the moment, hovering around the £7.1-7.2k mark.

Is there any wisdom, received or otherwise, that says fares are likely to come down? Last time I booked with Emirates, it was around £5k, so £7.1k is quite a hike!

I'm looking at travelling in February 2020.

Unfortunately those fares are about average for F on EK london to Oz, and are unlikely to come down by much.

Cheaper fares (£6k) are available from Germany (MUC /FRA DUS) if you are willing to do a positioning flight to there instead

When was this?

If you are willing to position, check out fares from Scandinavia.

As long as you are willing to endure Tunis air for a positioning flight you can do it for half that price from TUN, you certainly could last year anyway.

Last year!

Just done a quick search and even on an F flex ticket it is less than 4800 return. 42,500 tier miles for the one flight.

A lot of this has obviously got to do with availability of F Saver vs F Flex / Flex+. If last year you managed to get an F Saver fare and on the dates you are looking only Flex or Flex+ are available, you stand no chance.

And indeed, from European continental stations, fares are often significantly lower than from the UK. (even when comparing Flex with Flex etc). I have found AMS to work well. And it's a comparatively easy hop from LHR, LGW or LCY. When travelling with checked luggage, build in a lot of time for the transfer as the wait for luggage at AMS can be as long as the incoming flight (even when including the long taxi fro the 'polderbaan')

MXP-PER is 5500 GBP in Feb.

Thanks for all the replies people!

I really wanted to start in the UK - that way I can use all the benefits of F travel (limo for example), I may as well go Oneworld or some such if I have to faff about with positioning (I'm not anti-positioning, I just wanted to have a straight-forward simple ex-UK flight).

Might have to keep an eye out for the Saver fares and see if something materialises. Perhaps those days are over, or perhaps I just have to bide my time.

Weak £ probably doesn't help much at the moment.

Looked at the other ME airlines? QR (Oneworld)? EY do not fly into PER
Or ex another UK airport that is not LHR?

Some airlines, like CX, do not have first to Australia. QF only have first on the LHR-SIN-SYD route. QF LHR-PER-MEL [QF09/QF10] is business class: no first class.

Accepting business class will open more options.
PER can be a little hard to get to.

Great Circle Mapper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Airport

You can get MH LHR-SYD for c.£4.5k currently depending on exact dates, which would be LHR-KUL in Business Suites and KUL-SYD in Business. I haven't looked extensively but depending on flight combinations chosen it is possible to get Business Suites on the SYD-KUL leg and possibly the KUL-SYD leg too. PER is the same price but I don't believe you can get Business Suites on KUL-PER as MH don't fly the A350 there. It's arguably not quite EK, but for a saving of £2.5k it's still a great product.

I'm not convinced you'll get EK from the UK much cheaper than that to Australia, that just seems to be what EK charge for it these days.

But the OP wants to go to PER in first class.
As above "Accepting business class will open more options"
MH does fly KUL to PER

The OP wants to go to PER or PER/SYD open jaw. As stated in my post above, the same fare is also available to PER (albeit I was focusing on SYD as that allows two legs in Business Suites rather than one leg in Business Suites and one leg in Business which is necessary to PER). Note that despite being called Business Suites, MH's product is basically First by another name, hence the relevance here.