- Introduction
- The booking process
- Hong Kong – Clark with Cebu Pacific economy class
- Clark – Doha with Qatar Airways Boeing 787-8 business class
- Stopover in Doha with Oryx Rotana review
- Doha – Stockholm with Qatar Airways Airbus A359 business class
- Stockholm – Oslo with SAS business class
- Holiday in Norway with the kids.
- Torp – Copenhagen with Wideroe economy class
- Copenhagen – Doha with Qatar Airways Boeing 777 ‘old’ business class
- Stopover in Doha
- Doha – Angeles Qatar Airways Boeing 787-8 business class
- Angels – Hong Kong with Cebu Pacific economy class.
Now, the booking process of a big trip like this can be quite interesting and difficult, specially for those of us who wants to get the best possible value out of our hard earned cash and miles. This trip was all paid for in cash, which makes it a bit easier when you are 3 people travelling together.
For those of you who don’t know me, I am living in Hong Kong, but my kids are living in the Philippines, so when I had 2 weeks holiday this summer to bring them to Norway, I had first to position to the Philippines to pick up the kids before our journey together started. The reason for going to Norway is that my parents live there, so we all wanted to go and visit them.
As soon as my leave was confirmed from work, I went to flights.google.com and started monitoring flight prices from both Clark and Manila to Oslo on the dates we wanted to travel, and I subscribed to price alerts, so as soon as there is any change in the price I will get an email notification.
After a couple of weeks of monitoring the prices I had a good idea of what the cheapest price would be (it was fluctuating on a daily basis between 42.000 and 65.000 HKD for the three of us in business class. I had already made up my mind that I would be willing to pay for business class tickets this time, as we only had a bit more than a week in Norway and I wanted to arrive well rested, plus travelling alone with a 5 and 6 year old kid for 30+ hours is just too hard in economy for me (my kids would probably happily lay down in their seats and sleep, but I would end up stuck in the middle and not being able to move for most of the overnight flights…)
Anyways, the route and price that came out the best (I really wanted to avoid flying from Manila as that is at least a 3 hour drive each way, and if possible I wanted to fly to Oslo/Sandefjord Torp, as that is very close to my parents house), was Qatar Airways Clark-Doha-Stockholm and then SAS Stockholm – Oslo Gardermoen. For the return trip it would be Wideroe Torp – Copenhagen, and then Qatar Airways Copenhagen – Doha – Clark. It was also possible to fly Clark – Oslo direct with Qatar Airways, but that would be about 5000 HKD more expensive and still arrive almost at the same time, so I decided to go with the one extra flight instead to make the trip as cheap as possible. The total cost for the three of us was about 42.500 HKD.
Now, one of the highlights of the trip was that I was finally going to be trying out Qatar Airways Q-suites which is apparently the best business class product out there. For the return flight from Torp via Copenhagen to Doha I had the choice between a 10 hour stop in Copenhagen and 1 hour stop in Doha, or the other way around. Looking at the seat maps I saw that the earlier flight had Q suites, so I decided to go for that, and then have the 10 hour stop in Doha.
Also, if you book tickets with Qatar Airways and the shortest connection in Doha is more than 8 hours, they are offering a free stopover in a hotel, and free transit visas.
For the outbound flight the stopover was exactly 8 hours, and they did offer us a night stay at the Oryx Rotana Hotel in Doha. However, on the return, where we had a 10 hour stopover, they did not offering anything, as we could have taken a later flight from Copenhagen and then only had 1 hour stopover in Doha. The fact that we still needed a 10 hour stopover in Copenhagen instead didn’t matter, so no hotel was offered. It is a bit weird rule, but I guess as long as I got 1 night free I shouldn’t complain anyways 🙂