Many individual tour operators are also passing savings on to travelers. The package includes a night at the budget Hotel George Williams in Brisbane and three nights at the Islander Resort Hotel on the Gold Coast. V Australia has been offering four-night Brisbane Getaways in conjunction with Sunspots International, a South Pacific wholesale company, for $986 a person.
Qantas, for example, has been advertising $999 summer package deals that include six nights in Sydney, admission to the city’s aquarium and a flight from Los Angeles or San Francisco. Package deals that combine airfare, hotel and sightseeing are yielding some of the best bargains. Rooms at Quest Potts Point, formerly the Storrier, in Sydney, start at 165 Australian dollars, or about $130, down from about $175 last June, when rates began at 185 local dollars a night. A recent online search turned up nonstop round-trip fares from the West Coast to Australia in July as low as $690 on United and $790 on Qantas, including taxes and fees, and $864 from Newark on United, with a stop in San Francisco. And come July 1, Delta will add its first daily nonstop between Los Angeles and Sydney.Īll of this new competition has forced Qantas and United to answer with fare cuts.
It plans to add another route, to Melbourne, in September. In April, V Australia added three flights a week between Los Angeles and Brisbane, with rates from $738. It began flying daily between Los Angeles and Sydney in February with nonstop round-trip flights from $729. Qantas and United Airlines, which have long dominated the market with nonstop routes between the United States and Australia, are facing fresh competition from V Australia, a new airline from Richard Branson’s Virgin Blue Group. While fares have been running slightly higher in recent weeks, he added, prices are still “nowhere near last year.” This year, he said, he has seen one-way fares “as low as $299.” “Last year, the best you could do, depending on the season, was about $900 with a normal discount economy fare, to about $1,500” for a round-trip fare. van Bloemendaal, the Australian-born president of the Travel Leaders office in Rowlett, Tex. “There will probably never be a better time to visit Australia in your lifetime,” said Robbert J. On top of that, resorts from Uluru to Melbourne are offering discounts of as much 30 percent to lure guests amid the travel slump.Īnd airfare one of the biggest expenses of any trip to Australia has been slashed thanks to new entrants in the trans-Pacific air travel market. Just as the winter season in Australia is starting, the United States dollar has gained close to 25 percent over the last year against the Australian dollar, to 1.27 Australian dollars, bolstering Americans’ buying power. But for American travelers, some of the deepest discounts are Down Under.Ī number of factors are making Australia look like a steal this summer.
WITH the travel industry reeling, it’s not hard to find a vacation bargain.
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