Flights to China from Australia | Visas, Apps and the Transit Rule

The airfare is the easy part

China is between roughly nine and twelve hours non-stop from the east coast, depending on the city. The time difference is a couple of hours. The flights are frequent and the fares are usually reasonable.

None of that is what makes or breaks this trip.

What makes or breaks it is the paperwork and the phone in your pocket, and both need sorting before you fly rather than after you land. This page spends its effort there, because that is where we actually add value on this corridor. Ask us to check your China requirements.

The visa position, honestly

We are going to be unusually careful here, and the reason is that being confidently wrong would cost you a holiday.

China's entry requirements for Australians have changed more than once in recent years. There have been visa-free arrangements for various nationalities, transit exemptions at particular airports, and revisions to all of it. Any specific claim we make on this page could be out of date by the time you read it, and a blog post from eighteen months ago is worse than useless.

So: check the current rules on an official source, close to your travel date. And when we quote, we confirm the requirement for your exact passport and your exact itinerary rather than repeating what applied last year. If your household holds passports from more than one country, every one gets checked separately, because the arrangements are nationality-specific.

The transit exemptions in particular are worth asking about, because they can turn a stopover into a genuinely free extra city. They are also specific about which airports, which onward destinations and how many hours, which makes them exactly the sort of thing to have confirmed rather than assumed.

The phone matters more than the flight

This is the part Australians underestimate most, and it is the thing that ruins otherwise good trips.

China is close to genuinely cashless. Not "cards are widely accepted" cashless: the everyday economy runs on domestic payment apps. The noodle shop, the taxi, the temple ticket, the bike hire. Cash still exists and using it marks you as someone from another era, and some places will struggle to make change.

Linking a foreign card to the major apps has become considerably easier than it once was, and it is now a solved problem for most visitors. But it is solved before you land, at home, on your own wifi, with time to troubleshoot. It is not solved standing at a counter in Chengdu with a queue behind you.

A great deal of the internet you rely on is inaccessible. Some map, messaging and email services that Australians treat as infrastructure simply will not work. Download offline maps and translation before you go. Have a plan for how you will contact your hotel, your family and us.

None of this is a reason not to go. It is a reason to spend an evening preparing, and almost nobody tells travellers this before they book.

Take the train

Here is the genuinely joyful part of travelling in China, and it is the thing we most often talk people into.

The high-speed rail network is enormous, fast, punctual and cheap by any standard you are used to. On most of the routes visitors actually use, city centre to city centre, it beats flying comfortably once you count the airports at both ends.

Beijing to Shanghai. Shanghai to Hangzhou or Suzhou. Guangzhou to Guilin. These are train legs, not flight legs, and building them as flights is a common and expensive mistake.

So tell us the shape of your trip rather than the flights you think you need. Frequently the right answer is two international flights and a rail pass through the middle, and that is not a booking a comparison site can construct.

The open jaw

China is very large, and flying in and out of the same city means a backtrack you did not need.

Into Beijing, home from Shanghai. Or into Shanghai, home from Hong Kong. The open jaw removes the backtrack and usually prices similarly to a return, and on a country this size it saves a genuine day rather than a few hours.

Booking sites price open jaws badly when they price them at all, because they are built around a return. It is five minutes for a consultant, and it is the single most useful thing we do on China itineraries.

When to go

April to May and September to October are the two good windows: mild, dry, and the country at its most pleasant.

Summer is hot and humid across most of it, and the crowds at the major sights are at their worst.

Winter in the north is genuinely cold, and Beijing in January is a different proposition entirely. It is also cheap and clear and the Great Wall in snow is extraordinary if you can handle the temperature.

And then the one that catches Australians out completely: the national holiday weeks. When those land, an enormous share of the population travels simultaneously. Trains fill, flights fill, every major sight fills, prices rise and queues become genuinely extraordinary. If your dates can move, move them. If they cannot, book several months out and adjust your expectations about what "busy" means.

We check the holiday calendar before quoting, because it is the difference between a good trip and a fortnight in a queue.

Which airlines

The corridor is well served, both by Chinese carriers flying non-stop and by the Asian hubs connecting through. Singapore Airlines via Changi and Cathay Pacific via Hong Kong are both sensible one-stop options, and Cathay in particular makes sense when Hong Kong is worth two days of its own, which it is.

The honest note on alliances: the Chinese carriers largely sit in SkyTeam or Star Alliance, so if your points and status live with Qantas, they will not travel with you. Cathay is the Oneworld answer, and it is one more reason our Cathay page argues what it argues.

On a nine to twelve hour sector the cabin question is genuinely arguable rather than obvious, and our is business class worth it guide sets out where we think the line falls.

What the trip is actually like

Worth saying, because the paperwork sections above are not exactly an advertisement.

China is one of the great travel destinations and it is dramatically under-visited by Australians relative to how close it is. The Great Wall in the right section, away from the coaches, is genuinely staggering. The food is not one cuisine but eight, and the gap between Chinese food in Australia and food in Chengdu or Xi'an is the widest gap of its kind anywhere. The trains work better than ours. The cities are safe, clean and easy at street level.

The barrier is entirely front-loaded: an evening of preparation, a visa check, and a phone that works. Do those and the rest of it is one of the best fortnights available from Australia.

Send us the shape of the trip and every passport in your party: request your free China quote and a consultant replies within 2 business hours with fares in Australian dollars, the open-jaw version priced alongside, the rail legs flagged where a train beats a plane, and your entry requirement confirmed against the current rules rather than last year's.