New Zealand vacations: Qantas airfare sale starts at $349 each way

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.

Tip: I think the better deal is found in the vacation packages. They have a 10-day New Zealand Highlights trip that includes round-trip airfare from LAX-AUK, eight nights in hotels (Rotorua, Wellington, Christchurch, Queenstown and Auckland), six-day car rental and a flight from Queenstown back to Auckland plus transfers starting at $1,599. See the sale page for even more package deals.

When: Book by Nov. 2 for travel between May 1 and June 8, 2010.

Contact: Qantas Vacations New Zealand sale, (888) 306-3857

– Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel & Deal blogger

Photo: Outside Queenstown, the road cozies up to Lake Wakatipu. Credit: Mary Engel

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 30, 2009 at 9:22 am by Jen Leo and is filed under Airline travel, Deals, Pacific & Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.