Hello everyone out there.

Question: Cheapest Flight from S. America to New Zealand??!!

I am basically planning and anti-planning my rtw trip. I want to wing it but some things need to be planned. Mainly flight tickets. I need serious flight ticket help. Please bare with me as I have never flown and am completely at a loss with the process. I am willing to be flexible with the flights in every way. I will fly from any point in S. America and into any place in N. Zealand. Whatever is cheapest. I want to fly in Oct. at some point but would change this if I could save more money by leaving another date/month. I have several questions so I thank you in advance...

- I already decided against a rtw ticket but should I go with STA travel or something like that because it's cheaper? (Double question... I will be 26 in Feb. can I still do this? Worth it?)

- Should I book w/ a travel agent

- Best time to buy my ticket? Is now too early if I want to leave in June?

Believe it or not that is all I can think of for now. I tried to figure this out on my own but gave up and entered into the question portion we are at right now... I also apologize if this is the wrong thread, I didn't see a flight/ticket posting and figured it would get more reads in here than S. America. O.K. kids, have at it, learn me!

Thanks again.


Jeannine


How can one be lost without a destination?

If you're flying into NZ you'll be flying into Auckland. I suppose you can fly into Christchurch but I've never heard of it being cheaper for the long haul.

I'll lay it out- problem flying from South America to NZ is it will be expensive, as in $1500-2000 range expensive. Almost worth buying a rtw ticket for this segment alone depending on what you're doing! (Mind there's an interesting little island hopping across the Pacific thing you can do with an rtw- Santiago to Easter Island to Tahiti to Auckland- that is only cost-acceptable WITH a rtw.) The two places you can fly direct to NZ from are Santiago and Buenos Aires so those are probably your cheapest bets.

As for STA Travel, I'm not 26 yet but my friends who were teetering on that threshold tell me that so long as the ticket is purchased before your 26th birthday you're good to go. You can buy airline tickets a year in advance maximum, so you're good to go if you want to get that June ticket.

Good luck!

We are going from S. America to New Zealand and ran into the same problem. The cheapest we found was from Santiago, and we checked from every big city in S. America. It was about $1225/person to fly one-way into Auckland.

But then we just started messing around and checking flights from other areas, like Central America and the US. We found a $700 flight from LA, so then we tried to find a cheap alternative to LA. We had originally really wanted to go to Colombia and had cut it out because we started in Peru and were going as far south as Patagonia and didn't think we could afford to fly up to Colombia, and overlanding it just didn't make sense.

So we started checking flights to LA from all over S. America, and we found a decent multi flight trip, Santiago>Bogota>LA, for about $550/person. We are basically paying about $50 more, total, for both of to fly to Colombia and add a month there. It's just a matter of trial and error. We spent an entire afternoon sitting online trying different combinations while here in Buenos Aires.

We have primarily used www.kayak.com because it consolidates all kinds of airlines and websites. Hope this helps.