air fares 2...

well, there goes $1,000 AUD I won't be seeing again. The trip's booked, with the sideline to sydney and all.

see the budget/itinerary here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pYkGXyqd2mcXUF8cTu9KVSQ

that little sydney trick just saved me a couple hundred dollars, total cost of the outward jaunt is $488, including bus, train & plane. the next cheapest flights on that day (for much worse times) are:
qantas - $650, $778, $820, $900+
virgin - $625, $670

It's the return leg that's a real killer, at around $520. So overall not the worst, but could have been a lot better. moral of the story? book plane tickets as early as possible!!


interesting sidenote on the qantas web site (which by the way, although substantially better than virginblue still has a long way to go in terms of usability), the final booking confirmation page url looks like this: https://book.qantas.com.au/pl/QFdomestic/en/BookTripPlanServlet;jsessionid=

if in the same FF tab I overtype that with qantas.com.au, I get a SSL certname mismatch (the cert is against www.qantas.com.au, not qantas.com.au, oversight on their part I guess) the briefest flash of the Sun logo:
which leads me to believe that the qantas web site is hosted on a Sun Application Server.

The funniest bit tho, is that putting that url into another browser that doesn't have a current qantas session (like ie), it gets a 400 bad request error. strange...

Virgin isn't much better though, drop the 'www' off their site name and it doesn't resolve to anything, even though they own the domain. slack. (and the less I say about their popup window calender the better, at least qantas has the common decency to float a div...)



ps - feel free to comment!!!!

matt kerle