Australia 2008 - how do I organise it?

LesD

When Australia pops up on here, I'm surprised how few people recommend Mecury-direct! We've used then twice - once to Cairns and once to the Gold Coast - and found their prices very competitive and the service superb. The accommodation they use was superb at both places.

They start at 3 weeks 4-star S/C from £1050. Occasionally they have newspaper ads with even better prices than this!

Although their main offers are packages, they were able to allow us our own bolt-on to Sydney at the end of our Gold Coast stay. (M-d do, however, have their own stop-over packages to many places.) Qantas and Virgin Blue do very cheap internal flights between the major cities - just like our low-cost carriers.

M-d also use Emirates from BHX, MAN and GLA - a lot of the time with no supplements. We found Emirates to be brilliant. The UK-Dubai-Far East-Oz routing meant each sector was 7-8 hours. Better than a long-haul 12-13!

u2nick79

Hi efrieze,

This is nothing to do with your post - I was interested in your name? Is Frieze your surname, as mine is and it isn't a common name so was quite interested?

Ningaloo

Hi, as you can see from everyones answers there is so much to do and really so little time unless you have 365 days free...

I recommend getting out of the library a travel guide such as lonely planet, sit down and decide what you must do whilst you are there as it is a huge country and it can take hours only to move a centimetre on your map.

With you list of what you must do - visit Austravel and they will put an itinery together for you with flights and accomodation....say thank you I want to think about it and go home and hit the internet. Check out if you can get it cheaper elsewhere or direct.

Then the only decision is how much you want to pay and decide on cheaper or more plush accomodation. (Some can be very basic and expensive (monkey mia W.A) so have a good hunt).

Have a great time, we are all jealous and would love to go back in a flash!