This post isn’t so much about New Zealand as it is about Fiji. Or getting there. My first impression of airfare to New Zealand was ‘expensive’. Round trip is around $2000 and I’ve regularly seen the one way fares be just as much as round trip. For the three of us, that’d be about $5400, roughly. Egads!
But by chance I checked on Expedia. Ok, maybe not by chance. Maybe I’m actually an Expedia Affiliate so I tend to check there often on stuff (although I used them almost exclusively before starting the affiliate program). I found the normal $1700 fares, one way from Seattle but then a fare from Alaska Air caught my eye…..$850. What? From Seattle? Sure enough, upon clicking through the flight connects in LA and then Fiji. Wait….FIJI? For $850?
I was just happy with the New Zealand part, but I got a little more curious and checked into it. Sure enough, for $600, you can fly one way from LAX to NAN (Fiji) in December of this year. I actually want January of next year, but you can’t go ahead that far yet. Then it’s about $200 from NAN to AKL (Auckland, New Zealand). Wow. Things are starting to look up for this one way trip concept. Of course, I then found it quite expensive to get from NZ to Bangkok or Nepal or India or China, but we can cross that bridge later. It also helps to look at the Star Alliance’s awards chart and note for 40K miles you can get from the South Pacific to North Asia (so 40K to get from Fiji to the colds of Russia! Sweet!). But getting to those South Asia places like Nepal, are 70K miles, which only Kim has. Hmmm…. Good to know there are options!
Expedia also has a bitchin’ Hawaii promotion I almost got sucked into: $595 SEA->Hawaii and 4 nights hotel. Not bad.
