Emirates have one of the most impressive route maps of any airline. They fly to several ports in every continent from their home in Dubai and also have several flights that service more than one city creating a bunch of awesome fifth freedom routes. Many of these tag on flights can represent amazing value when used on their own. As an example, the Emirates flight between Bangkok and Hong Kong is often sold at a very reasonable price in either business or first class.
Another way to make the most of all these services, is to use them as stopover points creating multi-stop tickets on a return fare. Constructing a ticket this way can be incredible value and putting one together is pretty straight forward as long as you know where the opportunities are.
Here are some examples of city pairs operated by Emirates that can be used in these sorts of itineraries:
- Brisbane – Singapore
- Singapore – Colombo
- Colombo – Male (Maldives)
- Milan – New York
- Sydney – Auckland
- Melbourne – Singapore
- Rio de Janeiro – Buenos Aires
- Bangkok – Hong Kong
This is definitely not an exhaustive list, there are plenty more of these throughout Emirates’ route map.
Quite often, Emirates have pretty generous stopover rules in their fares and usually on the cheapest economy fares allow one free stopover in each direction and unlimited additional stopovers at $100 each. The routing paragraphs on their fares also usually include all realistic options, allowing you to utilise many of the extra points created by the fifth freedom routes as stopovers.
So as an example, here is what you could do with the current cheapest return fare from Brisbane to New York, which is in X class, has a base price of AU$1580 and is for departures from now until the 24th of November and between the 16th of January and the 30th of April.
- Brisbane to Singapore
- Singapore to Colombo
- Colombo to Maldives
- Maldives to New York (via Dubai)
- New York to Milan
- Milan to Dubai
- Dubai to Brisbane
The total price for this itinerary in X class is AU$2136! That’s made up of the $1580 base fare, 3 x $100 for extra stopovers and $256 in taxes. Pretty incredible value especially considering the whole itinerary is on Emirates metal.
For journeys beginning in North America, there are also some fantastic opportunities on the way to Asia, for example a return ticket from New York to Singapore, which has a base price of US$246 in T class and can be used to do the following:
- New York to the Maldives (via Dubai)
- Maldives to Colombo
- Colombo to Singapore
- Singapore to Dubai
- Dubai to Milan
- Milan to New York
The total price for this itinerary in T class is US$1424.06, which is the $246 base fare, 2 x $100 for additional stopovers and $978.06 in taxes. Those are some fairly heavy taxes but for that itinerary it’s still an incredible price.
Another benefit of all that flying is obviously the extra mileage that can be credited to Emirates Skywards, Qantas (keep in mind that status credits won’t be earned with Qantas) or Alaska Mileage Plan. The above Brisbane to New York itinerary for example includes over 29k flown miles.
