I'm not sure this this right place to post this; but here goes. My SO is going to be working in Fremantle from about 4/28-5/28. I plan to join him on around the 15th of May and we want to tour around the country for as long as we're allowed to stay with my tourist visa.

Trying to find fares from stl (st louis mo, usa) is proving problematical. Most of the fares promoted are for trips of 3 weeks or less. On expedia/travleocity I'm getting fares of $2600+ for coach(lucky SO gets to fly business class), which seems like a lot. Just mucking around I find I can fly from stl to London for around $700 and then onto Perth for around $1000 rt. Anybody here have any ideas for a good place to look for a reasonable fare to Oz if you want to stay for longer than 3 weeks.

Aside: Why do they do this? They are currently advertising fares of $999 LA to Sydney plus 3 in country flights, but the length of stay is only 21 days. Who can see even a tiny bit of Oz in 21 days?

If you could hack the $2500-$3000 price, you might consider a "circle pacific" fare, which would allow you (using the oneworld product, for instance) to travel up to 22,000 miles around the Pacific (including internal Oz flights on Qantas) for around US$2600, over the course of a year. If you could start the trip in LA (to save miles from STL) then you could, for example, go LA-Sydney-Perth-Melbourne-Cairns-Brisbane-Auckland-LA, or LAX-SYD-PER-MEL-NRT (Tokyo) -LAX or lord knows how many other permutations, using less than 22,000 miles.

Just a thought.

Thanks Gardyloo, I'll consider that. We were planning on doing most of our travel in Australia via back-packers buses but maybe we should rethink that option.

One of our constraints is that my husband's ticket will be supplied by his company and he can only get STL-Perth and Perth-STL or SYD-STL return.

I checked out this route a couple of years ago & it saved some $$. It can't hurt to see if this is feasible.

STL-SIN & SIN-PER. Didn't check details on stays, etc. One could try a very good travel agent & see what they come up with.

I flew several times to PER via Singapore. I find that round trips to SIN from US are inexpansive. Then from SIN, I book directly on either Qantas or Valuair. Valuair is cheaper than Qantas. Qantas only gives half mileage on their bargain flights. Valuair has no ff miles.

Have your husband tell his company that the business version of the Circle fare I mentioned is probably less than the round trip in business that they're now paying for.