Everyone knows that usually airfares to Europe from Australia never come in at less than $1600 or so at the best of times, right? And normally I’d consider $1800 a good deal from Sydney, with Qantas/BA usually pushing prices north of $2000.
If you’ve got the travelling guts, you can halve that by booking a ticket with S7 (a oneworld partner airline) from Sydney to Moscow via Frankfurt, travelling with Qantas on QF5/6 and connecting in Frankfurt to S7 operated flights to Moscow.
The deal’s been around for some time now, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Here’s how to get in on it and check prices and availability.
- Head to the S7 English site and plug in some rough dates from Sydney (SYD) to Moscow (MOW) to start researching availability. Be sure to check the ‘flexible dates’ option to bring up a grid of fares across a full month.
- Review the grid of dates that come back. You’re looking for the Red badged ‘promo’ fares, at 3960 RUB each way.
- Assuming you can find some dates that work for you, select them and the total price is calculated and shown in the left-hand column. For me, this priced at 29079.25 RUB which is equivalent to $903 at the time of writing; you can get an up to date conversion here.
- Selecting in the calendar grid then shows you the option to travel on QF5, connecting onto S7900 and returning on S7899/QF6.
- You can then check out using the booking engine as you’d expect.
The good news is that stopovers are technically allowed on this ticket (see the full fare conditions here)so if you can find a good travel agent willing to do some digging around, you could conceivably book something like
- Sydney – Frankfurt | Stop
- Frankfurt – XXX – Frankfurt
- Frankfurt – Moscow | Stop
- Moscow – Frankfurt – Sydney
You can’t, of course, avoid Moscow altogether as this would invalidate the ticket, but breaking the journey in Frankfurt on the outbound leg would help minimise jetlag. Also, bear in mind that the Russian authorities would like to charge $190 apparently for a double entry visa.
Credit to the always great experts in the Australian Frequent Flyer forum – threads here and here.