Archive for the 'Pacific & Australia' Category
New Zealand vacations: Qantas airfare sale starts at $349 each way
October 30, 2009 9:22am
If you can plan ahead to next summer, you might consider this early-bird New Zealand sale from Qantas Vacations. For five days only, travelers can get flights between Los Angeles or San Francisco and Auckland starting at $349 each way, pretax. That’s low season for New Zealand, but the sale still offers decent fares. Comparatively, fares were priced at more than $1,200 on both Air New Zealand and Qantas when I checked dates on Kayak for travel in mid-June. With this Qantas Vacations deal, the total price came to $897.
Deal or no deal? It was frustrating that when I went to the promo page I couldn’t test dates and fares on their website. I had the option of calling or using their live chat. I tried the live chat feature and got connected to a Qantas Vacations representative immediately. They gave me a price of $1,297, including taxes, for June 16-24. That didn’t seem significantly cheaper than what I could find on Kayak. When I asked whether there were any cheaper dates to travel in May or June she said early June, but I stepped away from the computer and the live chat timed out, leading me to start over. But I was glad I did - the next chatter returned round-trip LAX-AUK fares of $897, including tax, for June 3-10.
Qantas AirPass: Fly to South Australia, and three other Aussie cities, from $999
October 9, 2009 5:58am
If you’re considering a trip to South Australia, and want to take in a few destinations more quickly than a road trip will allow, an Aussie AirPass by Qantas could be just your ticket. Especially for those who can travel during May (on the brink of Australia’s winter, not summer), a current sale makes the region more accessible than ever.
Deal: On the South Australia Aussie AirPass, fly round-trip from Los Angeles or San Francisco to a major city in Australia at varying rates that start as low as $999, before taxes and fees. Plus, included with the AirPass are three domestic flights.
Prices are based on when you travel, as well as to which “zones” in the country you fly to. The $999 sale fare is being offered only for travel May 1 to June 8, 2010, in Zone 1, which includes Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart and Launceston.
Four Seasons Bora Bora: Teens chill out at Chill Island, a South Pacific paradise
September 13, 2009 2:00pm
To combat the “I’m bored,” syndrome that often strikes young travelers, Four Seasons Bora Bora has devoted an area of the French Polynesian resort to teens’ trip survival: Chill Island.
The facility has its own private beach, an indoor-outdoor lounge, Internet cafe and special activities such as al fresco nightclub dancing and snorkeling with the resort’s marine biologist. For the holidays, it will offer special programs: a movie night on the beach, a teen tapas dinner, and a party where teens can boogie in a sea of bubbles.
The Four Seasons, a newcomer to Bora Bora that is away from the main tourist region on Motu Tehotu, includes over-water suites and beachfront villas with pools.
Besides snorkeling, activities include kite-surfing across the lagoon and getting to know some of the island’s most treasured residents: sea turtles. Room rates start about $900 per night for an over-water suite, but specials are available.
Contact: Four Seasons Bora Bora , (800) 819-5053 (Four Seasons reservations)
—Rosemary McClure, Special to The Times
[Photo: Teens paddle boarding at Chill Island; Photo credit: Barbara Kraft/Four Seasons]
Tahiti deal: Flight and six-night stay for $1,298
September 11, 2009 5:55am
If you’re longing for an island escape to a faraway place, Air Tahiti Nui may have just the ticket. The airline, partnering with tour vendors, is offering “early bird” pricing for trips next year to French Polynesia. You need to book by Sept. 24 and travel between Jan. 11 and June 11.
Deal: One of the cheaper packages starts at $1,298 per person, double occupancy, for a six-night stay at the new Manava Suite Resort Tahiti, near Papeete. The 121-room resort, which claims to have the South Pacific island’s largest infinity swimming pool, has been getting mostly good user reviews on TripAdvisor. In addition to the hotel, the price covers round-trip economy airfare from Los Angeles and daily breakfast; taxes are extra.
Tested: You can book by phone or fill out a form on the airline’s website. I tried both on Thursday, Sept. 10.
4,320 tweets in three days? V Australia hosts real-time Twitter uber-marathon
September 10, 2009 9:06am
My thumbs hurt just thinking about it. But it can be done. V Australia Airlines has three friends in Sydney, Australia, tweeting every minute of their three-day trip. Why? To show you that a weekend in Sydney is totally viable. And how do I know that a team can tweet every minute of three days? Because they already had an Aussie group do it in Los Angeles. The latest uber-Twitter-marathon started at 4 p.m. PDT Wednesday. A little more than six hours later, they were up to 451 tweets.
There are a few ways you can follow the action:
– If you want to read each tweet, minute by minute, follow challengers Jade, Rob and Bobby on Twitter.
– You can follow the group twitter account, @4320SYD.
– There is also a stunning visual Tweet Wall that accompanies the event on their website 4320SYD, if you want to skim through all the photos. It shows that most of the tweets are Twit pics and lets you follow them as they ride motorcycles, go to Sydney’s Manly Wharf and the Taronga Zoo and more.
Honey, let’s spend the weekend in Australia
August 19, 2009 5:55am
V Australia really wants you to go Down Under. For the price of a typical round-trip ticket — on sale, I might add — V Australia is offering three nights’ hotel accommodations, including the flight between Los Angeles (LAX) and Sydney (SYD). However, your seat will be in economy class, not those luxe lay-down seats that the V Australia Fly Girls are showing off in the video above. Still, $720 per person is pretty cheap for a weekend for two in Australia and totally worth the bragging rights come Monday afternoon.
As its weekend in Australia website 4320Syd suggests, you can leave LAX at 11:45 p.m. on a Thursday night and arrive in Sydney at 7 a.m. on Saturday. Spend three fun-packed days in Sydney and leave Monday afternoon at 8 p.m., getting back home at 4 p.m. the same day!
Tested deal: The deal says to use package code SO9009 On V Australia to get deals starting at $720 per person, based on double occupancy. However, I couldn’t find where to book that deal on the website. I found flights for $394 each way, but I didn’t have anywhere to put the package code or figure out which hotel I’d be staying at. The page also asks you to book by calling or e-mailing. I tried calling next and was helped quickly. Note that your call will be picked up by Travel Scene, not V Australia.
Eco-resort being built on Marlon Brando’s Polynesian atoll
August 16, 2009 2:17pm
Marlon Brando’s French Polynesian atoll, Tetiaroa, will be open to the public for the first time when a new eco-resort called the Brando is completed in 2011.
[Corrected at 1:47 p.m. Aug. 18: This is not the first time that Tetiaroa will be open to the public. The atoll once had a small hotel that was open to the public.]
After years of false starts, construction has finally begun on the atoll, where the late, reclusive superstar lived for several years. The luxury resort will be the only hotel on Tetiaroa, a playground of Tahitian kings long before Brando bought it in 1965.
Plans call for 47 bungalow villas with private plunge pools, a spa, a fitness center and a community pool. Activities such as scuba diving and archaeological tours of royal Tahitian sites will be offered. Tetiaroa, about 35 miles from Tahiti, is a 13-island chain circled by a coral reef.
The Brando project is being overseen by Tahiti Beachcomber SA, whose chief executive, Richard Bailey, was a friend of Brando’s.
— Rosemary McClure, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Photo: Tetiaroa, the French Polynesian atoll where the Brando resort is being built. Credit: The Brando.
V-Australia’s cheap one-way tickets, LAX-Sydney or Brisbane, are hard to find
July 21, 2009 1:18pm
If you’ve heard about the V-Australia one-way sale between Los Angeles and Sydney or Brisbane and wanted to think about booking a trip this year you might already be out of luck. I started testing the sale that started July 20 and when I couldn’t find any of the fares online, I turned to their customer support service by phone. She said that they were nearly gone and though she could look up a specific date, she couldn’t just tell me which dates with the low fares were still available. Instead, she directed me to the website to try again. I couldn’t find the one-way sale fares (did you?) but I did find cheap round-trip fares starting at $349 one-way between Los Angeles and Brisbane.
Jakarta hotel blasts: How to use Twitter to get more info on breaking news
July 16, 2009 11:02pm
I was on my way to a dinner picnic at the beach when I checked my e-mail on my iPhone and found Los Angeles Times Breaking News “Bombs explode at 2 hotels in Indonesian capital” in my inbox. I read the article from my phone and could have accessed Twitter updates if I wanted to. I chose to wait until after dinner. The way in which news spreads with Twitter these days is so much faster than it even did a year ago; it can make your head spin trying to keep up. Here’s a quick how-to on following breaking news if you’re new to the Twitter game.
1. The Los Angeles Times makes it easy for you to follow breaking news. On the home page you’ll find the latest news story with a link to the most heated Twitter thread –- so you don’t have to go hunting for the “hashtag” that is being used for the topic.
2. See if the brands involved are on Twitter. The two hotels in the blasts were the Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott in Jakarta, Indonesia. Both hotels are on Twitter. The Marriott Twitter account (@MarriottIntl) had been tweeting about the incident since a little after 7 p.m. They replied to tweets saying:
“To all who have tweeted, we are gathering info and will have more as we learn details from Jakarta.”
“We are monitoring the situation, working closely w/authorities to ensure that our guests and associates are moved to safety.”
“Our deepest sympathies go out to the victims and their families.”
“We are currently working to assemble a list of employees and registered guests staying in the hotels.”
The tweets came well before the public statement on Bill Marriott’s blog, “Marriott on the Move” — which was the long form of the previous Tweets.
Roundup: Caspian Airlines crash in Iran; 7.8 earthquake off coast of New Zealand; most pet-friendly airlines
July 15, 2009 9:43am
> Here is a photo gallery from the Caspian Airlines jet that crashed in Iran today. It is believed that all 168 people on board Caspian Flight 7908, from Tehran to the Armenian capital of Yerevan, are dead.
“Caspian, a 16-year-old commercial airline, operates within Iran and to Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and Armenia, using Russian-made Tupolev jets that many Iranians fear are prone to malfunction,” reported Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times.
