How to book (very) early?

[Geoffrey]

Hi everyone

Here is my situation: I'm French and live in Australia, and I'm doing 1 or 2 trips to France a year.
Since my first ticket bought with Qantas is a round trip from France to Australia, everytime I go back to France I buy another round trip ticket from France to Australia.
The thing is that next year, I only want to go back to France for the Christmas-NYE period.
I have already bought my round trip ticket for 2011, with the return flight to France before Christmas. Then I need to buy another round trip ticket for 2012, with the France to Australia flight early January 2012 and the return to France before Christmas.

My question is: Since I can only book flights 1 year minus 2 weeks ahead on the Qantas site, when can I book this round trip ticket? Is it only possible? :-|

Thanks!

 

[JohnK]

Welcome to AF Geoffrey!

If I understand what you are doing correctly and you want to gain the most benefit from cheap(er) overseas airfares then realistically you will need more than 1 return trip a year.

If you only have 1 return a year the it gets very difficult and will depend on how long you stay in Frnace and the price of last minute airfares.

Example

Say you plan to return to Australia from France on 04/01/2012 then you will need to book the return by around 02/01/2012 (if not sooner) and the latest the return can be from Australia to France is ~19/12/2012. I have a weird feeling that airfares are going to be very expensive 2 days before peak travel period.

 

[Geoffrey]

I agree, if I book in January it's going to be too expensive...

I thought about buying a ticket straight away with the first flight (France to Australia) in January 2012 and a dummy return, that I would change early next year to some day in December 2012 before Christmas.
But this dummy return would have to be in the same fare class as the one in December, so how do I know which date and price to choose for the return?

 

[ozmille]

Hi everyone

Here is my situation: I'm French and live in Australia, and I'm doing 1 or 2 trips to France a year.
Since my first ticket bought with Qantas is a round trip from France to Australia, everytime I go back to France I buy another round trip ticket from France to Australia.
The thing is that next year, I only want to go back to France for the Christmas-NYE period.
I have already bought my round trip ticket for 2011, with the return flight to France before Christmas. Then I need to buy another round trip ticket for 2012, with the France to Australia flight early January 2012 and the return to France before Christmas.

My question is: Since I can only book flights 1 year minus 2 weeks ahead on the Qantas site, when can I book this round trip ticket? Is it only possible? :-|

Thanks!

Bonjour Geoffrey,

I have been doing the same thing for about 4 years now but to Belgium. I buy my tickets usually around December for a July trip to Sydney and I book the rreturn leg in as late as possible. Then once I am back in Sydney in July I change the return trip to late June to go back to Belgium. I find that most tickets from Europe allow one free date change. If you have some rough dates and preferred airlines I can have a look a pricings.

 

[Geoffrey]

I'd like to fly QF from France to Australia with dates from 7 Jan. to 22 Dec. 2012. Which of course is impossible to book that early.

That's what I was saying in my last post: last year I bought a ticket with a random dummy return in May (the latest I could book), but when I wanted to change it to August, I couldn't find a flight with the same fare class as my dummy flight: the SYD-LHR segment was OK, but not the LHR-TLS (my final destination) codeshared with BA. And QF couldn't allow me to pay the fare difference, I had to fly another day...
I'd like to avoid that and book a dummy flight (including the segment with BA) of the same fare class so when I'll want to move the return I can change it to the date I want.

It would be like this:
Buying a France-Australia return ticket today for flights in 7 Jan. and a dummy return at a random date.
After January, I would change this return flight to 22 Dec..

But how do I know which date to book the return, for it to be the same fare class as a flight in Dec.?!

 

[ozmille]

I use a Belgium based TA as they usually get some amazing special fares with different conditions compared to the fares that can be bought over here. Not sure about Y fares as I personally buy J but from memory friends have told me that they pay about EUR1200 for their tickets. And the easy bit is that the TA can then change the ticket and you don't have to worry about that.