Australia holiday with trailfinders

Monkeykv

I'm planning a 3 week family holiday in syndney and Melbourne over Christmas and new year. Not really sure how to go about this myself.
I got a really helpful itinerary from trailfinders. So expensive, but I was expecting that.
Any other ideas or suggestions? Any other travel agents I should try?
Thanks in advance.

gettingtheresometime

Have you thought about what you'd like to do at these places?

Monkeykv

Spend time exploring the tourist attractions in city, trip to blue mountains, penguin island, theme park, great ocean road etc
Fly from Scotland to syndney, spend 1 week there then fly to Melbourne for 2 weeks. Any ideas of travel agents I should try?

Gloomendoom

Just an hour ago booked our holiday in Oz for Christmas. Just over £1600 for the two of us with a three day stopover in Singapore.

Get the plane tickets booked asap and sort out the accommodation later.

comeandgo

You can fly Glasgow to Sydney with Emirates or Edinburgh or Glasgow to Sydney with changes in Amsterdam with Singapore Air. Price the flights yourself on their web pages. You hire a car, reading on Trip Adviser looking for praise or vent on certain companies. You use booking.com or other hotel site and book hotels direct. You can take a train from Sydney to Blue Mountains or drive your hire car.

It's really easy to do it yourself though the first time I went I used Trail finder. We stopped two nights in Singapore to break up the journey which they arranged too.

gettingtheresometime

We spent 5 days in Sydney at Christmas and a brilliant time.

We did the bridge climb & went to the Blue Mountains on an organised day trip. Bondi was a disappointed but walked from bondi to coogee along the coast .....and walked along some far nicer beaches.

The bridge climb was expensive (but I enjoyed it lol) the trip was about $89pp and the train fare to bondi was about $8 pp.

Have you thought about costing it up and doing it diy? Even getting from the airport to the centre was easy (about $18 on the train)

stevie11

To the OP, are you comfortable to book flights, car hire, hotels and trips yourself? If so arranging everything yourself will probably save you money and will have more freedom with the bookings especially the accommodation. You could use the itinerary that you have been given as a starting point.

The TA's have to make their money somewhere and also any comeback if things go wrong.

£800 each seems a decent price especially over Christmas and new year.

I have never been to Oz before but have recently booked flights to Brisbane for Nov/Dec with Cathay. I know I want to be in Brisbane and Sydney on certain dates so just a matter of researching best options travelling between the two cities and then hotels and site seeing trips. I am confident doing it myself though so don't require a TA.
Good luck

Gloomendoom

Don't forget to look for voucher codes if you decide to go DIY. I got 25% off internal flights with Virgin Australia in return for five minutes on Google

mgdavid

Would you use a travel agent to organise a week in Edinburgh followed by a week in Dublin? It's really not a lot different, DIY is easy, just remember to work around the time difference if you phone hotels / motels.

richardw

Trailfinders are good, but they don't have the time to do as much thorough research as you to perfect your trip, so best to do it yourself.

As regards flights, I do find that new aircraft such as A380, B787 are better to fly on, so consider these along with A350 aircraft. Premium economy on the longer overnight sectors can be good and sometimes possible for reasonable extra.

Monkeykv

Thanks so much everyone. My gut is telling me to do it myself. But the itinerary from trailfinders seems perfect for me
Albeit £9600 for the 4 of us.

The flights I was looking at on skyscanner ranged from £5000-£6000!