As far country in the south, one the most expensive item for traveler to New Zealand will be the flight ticket. With the rise popularity of the country, actually there are more options to flight there. This post will share our experience how to get affordable ticket to fly to the country.
We based in Singapore so we searched flight route Singapore to New Zealand. But the general tips should be applicable from any other countries as well.
Airline Website
The only airlines flying direct between Singapore to New Zealand are Air New Zealand the country national carrier and Singapore Airline, the Singapore national carrier. Both of them are full service airline or in other words, non cheap airline. However, we always can try to visit the website and see of there will be some deals on the dates we plan to go. At the time when we plan our trip in 2017, the cheapest return flight using Air New Zealand from Singapore to Christchurch is around SGD $2000 per person. Of course we are not taking that flight because it is really out of our budget.
Google Flight
We encounter google flight accidentally few years a go. Since then this is our main tools to do initial search for flight to see the cheapest ticket and the date. We always make the final booking in another travel website or directly in the airline website.
There are several features that we like so much from google flight. First, it is fast and I would say almost instant. Second, we can do open-ended search without the need to put the exact destination. We can search by country destination, based on date and it will recommend the cheapest ticket among several recommended destination.
The open-ended experience is very useful to our case because we really just need super cheap ticket instead of exact destination in New Zealand. The reason we went to Christchurch instead of Auckland or Wellington is just because the cheapest ticket that we found is to Christchurch. At the end of the day, that choice is a good choice anyway because Christchurch is the best city to go for whom that want to explore South Island of New Zealand.
Using google flight, we found that Jetstar is serving flight to New Zealand. The flight is via Melbourne and because it is a budget flight the comfort will be not as good as full service airline. There is no free in flight entertainment, no free meal, no free luggage. But we can’t complaint much because we found the ticket which is less thatn SGD $1200 for two person to Christchurch. The reason we didn’t aware this flight before is because Jetstar is not serving this route everyday.
Traveloka
Traveloka is Indonesia online travel booking company. This is our must used online booking service because first it is an Indonesian company, which we have to support and second, they are quite good. Most of the time we use traveloka to book the itinerary that we have chosen using Google Flight. The main reason is there are usually some coupon code promotion and at the time of this writing, there is no credit card fee if we book using Traveloka, compared with directly book in the airline website. Budget airline is notoriously in this aspect because they can charge up to $40 for credit card booking fee which makes service like Traveloka is really valuable to budget traveller like us.
Others
Actually there many online travel booking service or just travel service aggregator which is older and bigger than Traveloka, such as Kayak, Orbitz, Expedia, Priceline, Skyscanner, Wego and so on. The reason we still use combination of Google Flight and airline website or Google Flight and Traveloka are just because we see it is still cheaper compare with using those names. But of course we will explore those alternatives in our upcoming trip.
At the end traveling is an expense that you can make as cheap or as expensive of your lifestyle. If you have to fly using full service airline, it means you need to budget accordingly for more expensive ticket price. But we always look cheaper airlines which usually means budget airline so that we can travel for more often and to more places.