A Trip Down Under 2019

A Trip Down Under 2019
Qantas 747 Business Class San Francisco - Sydney
Qantas Business Class Lounge, Sydney Airport
Qantas A330 Business Class Sydney - Auckland
Holiday Inn Auckland Airport - Review
The Pavilions Hotel, Christchurch - Review
What We Saw In Christchurch
Hilton Queenstown Resort and Spa - Review
What We Saw In Queenstown including Doubtful Sound Tour
Avani Metropolis Hotel, Auckland - Review
What We Saw In Auckland
Oceans Mooloolaba - Review
What We Saw On The Sunshine Coast
Brisbane Marriott - Review
Qantas 787 Business Class Brisbane - Los Angeles

My big trip for 2019 was two weeks Down Under and once again pals D and C were with me.  D had a milestone birthday in 2019 so she selected the destination. We spent most of our time in New Zealand but ended up on the Sunshine Coast of Australia for a little beach time at the end.
Getting to Australia and New Zealand in premium cabins are some of the most difficult flights to find, so we made sure we were flexible with our dates.  In mid-January I found three business class award tickets from Brisbane to Los Angeles on Qantas.  Brisbane is the closest airport with flights to the US from our beach destination so that was perfect.  We snagged those seats before we even had tickets to get us there!  These flights were on Wednesday, October 30th.  Cost: 80K American Airlines miles and $81.83 per ticket.

About two weeks later, I saw two business class award seats open up from San Francisco to Sydney.  C (who lives in Chicago) and I grabbed those.  D (who's in Los Angeles) would book her economy flight on AA through the Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) shopping portal, allowing her to use her UR points for 1.25 cents apiece.  We could all meet up in Sydney and catch the same flight over to Auckland together.  Cost: 80K AA miles and $28.20 per ticket for the business class seats.

Our longhaul flights: Green = outbound flights, Blue = return flights

At this point we didn't really have a plan as to what we were doing in New Zealand and we actually went quite a few months without locking in hotels.  But as spring turned to summer we knew we needed to start working on that.  We knew we wanted to visit Auckland, Christchurch and Queenstown and figured we'd work our way down the country, visiting the cities in that order.  However, when we started looking at flights from NZ to the Sunshine Coast of Australia it seemed that from Christchurch and Queenstown there was typically only one non-stop per day so that if something went wrong and that flight got cancelled, we'd get into the Sunshine Coast much later than originally planned.  In the end we decided to start our trip for real in Christchurch, go down to Queenstown and then back up to Auckland and from there fly to Australia.  But by this point we'd already booked our flights into Auckland from the US and didn't want to pay to change our tickets.

Short haul flights: each color represents a separate ticket

While our intra-NZ flights were all pretty short, we decided to do this instead of renting a car for a couple of reasons.  First, none of us were keen to drive on the other side of the road, even though we'd done that before.  Second, the flights were cheap - all under $110 USD - and were faster than driving.  For example, in Queenstown we mentioned to a waiter that we'd just arrived from Christchurch and she asked if we'd driven the six hours.  Nope, the flight was only an hour.  New Zealand highways are often just two lanes and wind through the countryside so away from the cities you don't find the super-highways that exist in the US.  Many of the flights between cities are single-cabin planes on full-size jets like Airbus A320s so there are a lot of folks choosing flying over driving in the country.

Final Thoughts

This trip included over 23,000 miles of flying and 12 flight segments on five airlines which is more than either my 2015 trip to Australia and Fiji or my 2017 trip to China and Tokyo.  Perhaps the most amazing statistic? My checked bag didn't get lost and was never even late!