Who would have thought it would take weeks of research and discussion to make two long haul flight bookings. Want to know why?
Firstly, needed to land close to the start of our cycling adventure and secondly, needed to fly out of a location near the end. So that meant we had to make decisions on the routes to ride and timeframes - no more procrastination! So much to see and do, can't do it all! The outcome is we are flying into Frankfurt on 12th August 2025, and flying out of Marseilles on 24th September 2025. (and yes, we do know that Frankfurt is not in France, but hey, first four letters are the same).
Secondly, needed to choose an international airline. This was linked to the point above, but was mainly influenced by considerations such as overall journey time, policies regarding bike boxes as luggage, and the cost of additional legroom (no 194cm man wants to start an overseas holiday being cramped in normal economy for over 24hrs). Choosing the airline involved creating a spreadsheet (yes, Karina's happy for the world to understand her love of spreadsheets) summarising research on baggage policy and costs, and extra legroom costs. And let me tell you, this took time and commitment to find this information from some airline websites! needles in haystacks....... The international airlines on the shortlist were Turkish Airlines, British Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Thai Airlines, Etihad Airways and Air India. And the winner was - Thai Airlines. Thai Airlines have a bike box as a single piece of standard 25kg checked luggage and the cost of the extra legroom was $956.60. And continuing with her love of calculations and data - you'll get plenty of data, stats and info in the months to follow on this cycling holiday blog holiday - this legroom works out to just over $12pp/hr - a very worthwhile investment.
Thirdly, how to buy the tickets. NIB Health Insurance members get 5% off when buying Webjet vouchers, so using Webjet seemed like a good solution. Webjet and Thai Airlines' own site had the same pricing (this is not always the case, and it takes time and effort to compare across sites but is well worthwhile). It was a bit of a pain that NIB had a daily limit for buying Webjet discounted vouchers, so took a few days to buy enough for the total flight cost of just over $6,000. But once again, the calculations show this is a $300 saving, and that equals more cheese, pastries and wine in France!
So, Sydney to Bangkok - 9hrs 20min, 2hrs 35min airport layover, Bangkok to Frankfurt - 11hrs 30mins.
Coming home: Marseilles to Frankfurt - 1hr 45mins, 2hrs 20mins layover, Frankfurt to Bangkok - 10hrs 30mins, 2hrs 5mins layover, Bangkok to Sydney - 9hrs.
