Flights booked!!

We've taken the big plunge and booked the flights to and from London. The Qantas fares on sale now are just too good to miss - I had allowed $6000 in our budget for two return flights to London and the actual price was $3825.72.  I've paid by BPAY to avoid the outrageous fees Qantas charges for credit card bookings - $30 per person!!  I cannot imagine anyone writing a computer system so complex that it costs 30 cents to process a booking, let alone $30.

Anyway, we'll be leaving Sydney for London on 11 August 2014 and then leaving London to come home on 22 September - basically 6 weeks away from home. 2 weeks of that is on a cruise, but the rest of it is yet to be planned - something to keep me busy for the next 10 months or so!

My next two steps:

• Go off and book some travel insurance.  
• Panic about our money for the next couple of days until Qantas (hopefully) tells me that the BPAY worked :-)

Still dreaming about holidays

39 days until our November cruise - finally I can say "we're going on a cruise next month"!!  And, I don't think I've done anything more about it than I had the last time I posted.  Really, as I said last time, there's nothing much to do anyway for a cruise from Sydney - just pack and go!

Next year's holiday - travelling around England and doing the Baltic cruise - is finally starting to seem a bit more real, although the scope is still not 100% certain. 

I spent some time a few weeks ago doing up a trial itinerary, just to see whether it's even going to be possible to see the places on our list in the time we have (turns out, mostly yes!) and to get an idea of whether we'll even be able to afford it.  That's a harder question to answer, but assuming that neither of us decides we've had enough and retires from work, and assuming that Tony Abbott doesn't sack us both, and also assuming that the Aussie dollar doesn't slide too much further in comparison with the pound and the US dollar, then it still looks like a goer.
We have already booked and paid a deposit on the cruise.  Fortunately, we pay for it in Aussie dollars and as far as I can see the contract doesn't let them increase the price even though the actual value of what we have agreed to pay has been slowly sinking in comparison with the US dollar - which of course is the cruise line's preferred currency.  When I booked it back in April, the cruise plus pre-paid gratuities was just under $5,900 Aussie dollars.  Today, to book the same category of cabin and pre-paid gratuities would cost just over $7,300 of those same dollars.  Glad we booked early  :-)

So, the cruise is fine, and I was thinking about leaving the final 'go or no-go' decision until next year.  Trouble is, Qantas currently have a sale on for flights to Europe and the UK next year.  Before the sale started they were quoting me $3308 each for the return flight to London, but the sale price is $1813 each.  This is really cheap for Qantas and in fact is pretty cheap for any flight to London any time.  This price is so good that that it's really tempting to book now, but that means making all those decisions I was hoping to ignore for a few more months - settling on the exact travel dates, buying travel insurance etc.  And it also means making the big leap of faith that the Aussie dollar isn't going to sink too much further - otherwise we'll be staying somewhere in the English countryside eating noodles for 6 weeks  :-)
It's still a few days until I can book the flight - they're taking return bookings for 19 September 2014 now and we'd want to come back around 23 September - so I've got a little while yet before I need to get serious about this.