There are 3 airlines which offer direct flights from Melbourne – Kuala Lumpur.
2. Emirates
3. Air Asia
From our flight experience, price ranges from AUD500 – AUD1800 return. Yes, such a huge difference indeed! Normal price is about AUD1100-AUD1200.
Travel time from end of December – mid January is actually peak period (because of Christmas, followed by Chinese New Year). Therefore you should hop onto the next best deal you see as early as possible, otherwise the price can only go up and up.
You may be lucky for super cheap deals with Air Asia (where you must be on top of promotions, first ones to book at 2am or 3am, and be patient with page refresh). We recommend you hop onto the mobile web to book your flights (less traffic), and complete your add ons later on. Note: Air Asia is a budget airline, therefore the initial price quoted is excluding food or luggage or entertainment, so be vary when comparing prices! Plane seats are generally slightly smaller. If you are a big person, pay a little extra for Premium Economy or stick with the non-budget planes. We suggest reserving a seat towards the back of the plane, because it’s usually where extra empty seats are available (provided the plane is not fully booked).
Air Asia’s terminal is LCCT (not the fancy KLIA), which do have sufficient share of Duty Free shopping and restaurants. Just take note when you are arranging connecting flights. LCCT is about half hour drive away from KLIA. All other international airlines fly into KLIA terminals. Another local budget airline (Firefly) and resort flight (Berjaya) uses Subang airport (which is about 1 hour drive from Sepang where KLIA/LCCT is located). Check out the other post about airports in KL.
Emirates tends to have lower prices closer to the travel dates. You may get good deals about AUD800. However, we worry that it may be too much of a risk to wait for the promotion prices to be updated as it gets closer to the peak period. Generally we hear of good experience with Emirates, beware that the flight times are very odd (3am!). We were upgraded to Business Class on our very first Emirates flight (and I suspect it is because Ben carries a Western name!) which has excellent service, of course. But we had some "period-mood" stewardess on the way back and it sucks.
Malaysian Airlines prices are very dependent on season. There are promotional prices at times, but be vary of the restriction (e.g. not allowed to change the travel dates of the ticket). If you can get a full price economy return ticket for AUD1200 or less, grab it because we predict it could go up to AUD1800 as the date draws closer. If you are thinking of a holiday outside of KL (other parts of Malaysia / Asia), do look out for Melbourne à Destination à Melbourne with Malaysian Airlines as it will have stopover in Kuala Lumpur, and you will be able to travel to another place with only a little extra, or sometimes, strangely enough, less than just heading to Kuala Lumpur! You are not able to book stopover dates via Malaysian Airline website, but you can do so on Expedia website and call up Malaysian Airlines office in Melbourne to have a sanity check on your online transaction for your flights and perform minor changes easily for free (unlike Qantas which charges anything and everything they can as soon as you speak to a human!)
Others: You can also hop on to one of the following which flies into KL via Singapore (SIA and Jetstar) or have the option of travelling by bus / train (5 - 7 hours) from Singapore to KL.
1. Qantas
2. Singapore Airlines
3. JetStar
I (WK) personally do not like Qantas for international because it is normally more expensive than the others, and no hot stewardess! Also, I’m just anti Singapore Airlines though a lot of people seem to like it. Jet Star is only good when there are cheap deals (watch out for Friday fares) - the best fare we hopped on was AUD200 one way but the promotion was only for 2 hours (I think) on a Friday evening!
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