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.
What are the Visa requirements for flying into Russia? I was told that unless you are on an organised tour, you will not get a visa to enter the country. Is this true?
Pretty sure you need to apply in advance for a visitor visa. My reading online led me to believe you could definitely travel independently, but you’d need to organise a visa in advance costing somewhere north of $75 per entry.
However, that’s all from memory, you should do your own research and don’t trust me!
weirdly, it wouldn’t offer me Moscow as an option! I know Ekaterinburg is where they shot Nicholas, Alexandra and family, but the other cities didn’t mean much!
weirdly, it wouldn’t offer me Moscow as an option! I know Ekaterinburg is where they shot Nicholas, Alexandra and family, but the other cities didn’t mean much!
Where you trying from Sydney or Melbourne? It only offers an option for Moscow from Sydney, I guess because it requires travel on QF5/QF6.
Where you trying from Sydney or Melbourne? It only offers an option for Moscow from Sydney, I guess because it requires travel on QF5/QF6.
Do you think you could book this, fly it one way and get a refund on the return? As far as I can tell from the fare conditions (admittedly I am new to this) you would get a refund of the fare, less 25% of the return segment fare, less a 900 rubles/25 EUR charge, and possibly a 300-400 RUB charge for refunds from outside Russia.
I’ve found the S7 site offers two different date condition summaries depending on where you look. The correct one (labelled with Promo up the top) is shown near when you first select your fare, but then another (labelled with Economy) is shown in the checkout phase. I’d reckon the first one is correct.
The Promo conditions I believe stated that (but please check this) that there was no refund after departure.