Six weeks ’til London

I’m heading off back to the UK for one of my top-up trips back to London. I’ve been uhmming and ahhing about it for long enough, so I decided to finally look into flights about a week ago. I was quite shocked as to how much these flight tickets had risen in price. Whereas about a year agao I paid something like $2850 for a return flight to London, this year it was going to cost me close to $3400-3500 with most Star Alliance carriers – including Singapore and Air NZ – Thai wanted close to $3800! However, a couple of friendly travel agents put me on to a good deal with Asiana Airlines flying a WLG – SYD – ICN – LHR – ICN – SYD – WLG routing, with the WLG – SYD – WLG parts being carried by Air NZ. This was quoted as around $2500, but I’ll only earn half the air miles on my frequent flyer plam with bmi that I would do with other carriers. I decided that it was worth doing this time as I wanted to have a break. I also decided to cash in quite a few AmEx Membership Rewards points collected over the last 2.5 years on a special time-limited offer that AmEx was running – get 10% off the price of the holiday / flights if you booked through them. All in all, I got another $1000 off, making the flights around $1550. That’s about the cheapest cash price I’ll ever pay for a revenue ticket between NZ and the UK on a decent airline. In economy class, of course.

I’ve never flown with Asiana, but I’ve heard good things and they’re rated as a good airline in independent industry reviews. They’re paying for an overnight stay in Seoul in order to make the morning connection on my way over to London. I’ll enjoy at least a few hours shopping at night and getting to see a few interesting things. Asiana are also reported to do some bonkers things on their flights, like have their attendants dress up and perform a cultural fashion show and there are even rumours of a roving magician on some flights. Somehow I can’t imagine this on anything other than an asian carrier. Certainly not in the USA – well, not without the attendant being wrestles to the ground by some flight security agent. On the way back, I’ll have half a day in Sydney to get to cicular key and take a ferry trip to Manly. Oct 29th, here I come.