New Zealand

patrick1

Worth mentioning that you can often get travel agents to pricematch or lower the fares if you get quotes for the same flight elsewhere.

I always used to do that with Flightcentre, but now usually just buy the flight from the airline's website.

A travel agent is worthwhile if you want to have more control over how long you're stopping over in Asia/US.

For internal flights in NZ I always just book whoever's cheapest between https://www.airnz.co.nz and https://www.qantas.co.nz - when I was there in March, airnz were cheaper for most internal flights.

But if you're wanting to do it on the cheap then get buses and ferries -- there are a few backpacker buses like http://www.kiwiexperience.com/ if you want to visit all the touristy sights or just get standard intercity buses.

bylromarha

When planning our trip to NZ, we found the Lonely Planet book by far the best place to start.

davidlizard

We went about 4 years ago.

The most useful website we found was https://www.jasons.co.nz, which has a massive accomodation listing for all budgets (top hotels to hostels and camping), and also links to activities and the like, including the links to their websites.

We booked up the first few nights, then arranged the rest as we travelled around. Jasons also do a free directory about an inch thick that can be picked up at many places, which is basically a hard copy of their internet site - we found places we liked the look of and phoned them up a day or two in advance to see if there were vacancies and never had any problem (this was in February).

There were three of us when we went - we found the motels great value (if you don't mind retro-70s stlye furnishing!).

Internal flights can be very cheap on certain routes. The NZ AA website had some distance (and more importantly times between) towns which is useful for planning.

If you find yourself near the Fox Glacier, then get up early one morning and make your way to Lake Matheson to get the standard postcard picture - you need to get there at dawn and there is a 10 minute window between it getting light and the breeze picking up putting ripples on the water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_matheson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LakeMatheson.jpg