In Reply to: Honeymoon in Bali? posted by MaryW ® on Friday, 30. November 2001 at 10:45 Bali Time:
Here's a posting my husband did back in March 2001 from our honeymoon. We flew Eva Air from San Francisco -- cheaper and better seats than others.
The Flight - EVA airlines was a good choice One of the most helpful things I found from the forum was the consensus on what airline to take to Bali: Eva Airways (www.evaair.com.tw). While I don't know what availability and pricing is like in high season, we got round trip tickets in Evergreen Deluxe (a.k.a. 'Luxury') Class for only $948 each
from San Francisco to Bali. This is quite a deal, given that this amounts to business class seating on the long leg of the journey (the 12 hour leg from SFO to Taipei), for about a third the price you'll find for any other business class ticket. It's even competitive in price with Coach class tickets. The seats recline about 45 degrees (with a 38' pitch), and are 24' wide, so it's easy to sleep. While these 12 hour flights seem interminable to me when in coach, I really don't mind the long trips in business class. The worst thing you could say about Eva was that their boarding process was a bit disorderly. You can tell I'm pretty satifisfied when my biggest concern is that the deal is too good to last. Suffice to say I plan to use them again the next time I'm travelling to Asia.
One note about availability - these tickets, for reasons I don't entirely understand (perhaps because the intermediate 'Luxury' class is not an industry standard) don't show up on typical on-line travel fare search engines. I may have even got a better fare than could have been obtained through the airline directly, by calling a ticket fare consolidator. I bought mine through Borneo Travel in San Francisco (1-800-226-7636 in the USA; 415-291-8435 also works). Jerry is one of their Indonesia Experts, although probably any of their agents can help.