Getting Between the Four Cities — Flights, Not Trains

This series covers roughly 4,300km in under a month: Perth in the west, then Adelaide, then Melbourne for Boxing Day, then Sydney for the new year. In most cricket-touring countries that distance would be a rail-planning problem. In Australia it isn't — the rail options that do exist are either too slow to be practical or don't run the route you need at all, so this is a flights problem, and it's worth planning that way from the start rather than discovering it late.

The Indian Pacific runs Perth to Adelaide, but it's a two-night, three-day journey, built as a scenic experience in its own right rather than transport between Test matches. The Overland connects Melbourne and Adelaide in about 10.5 hours one-way, once or twice a week depending on the season. Neither covers the Adelaide-to-Melbourne-to-Sydney leg in a way that fits around match days, and there's no direct rail link from Perth to anywhere else on this trip that isn't the Indian Pacific's multi-day version. Budget the trains out of this itinerary entirely and fly.

The good news: this is one of the best-served flight corridors in the world for exactly this problem. Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin Australia all fly every leg of the route. Perth-Adelaide runs about 50 flights a week, roughly 2 hours 50 minutes to 3 hours 15 minutes depending on direction and winter jet-stream timing. Adelaide-Melbourne is short and frequent — about 1 hour 20 minutes, with around 18 flights a day across the three carriers. Melbourne-Sydney is the busiest leg by a wide margin: it's one of the world's top-10 busiest domestic air routes, with a fully loaded plane taking off roughly every 15-20 minutes at peak times and combined daily departures well into the dozens.

That frequency is genuinely useful if a Test finishes early or a session gets rained out and your flight plans shift — there's almost always a later same-day option on the Adelaide-Melbourne and Melbourne-Sydney legs specifically. Perth-Adelaide has less slack; missing a booked flight there can mean a real wait, so build in more buffer on that leg than the others.

On price: domestic fares here move fast and vary a lot by how far ahead you book. The commonly cited sweet spot is booking one to two months out, and booking about 22 weeks ahead can save meaningfully more on the Sydney-Melbourne route specifically. Jetstar runs a weekly "Friday Frenzy" sale around 4pm AEDT; Virgin's "Happy Hour" sales drop less predictably on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. Whichever you book, run the price through to the final total before comparing — Jetstar's headline fare never includes checked luggage, and Virgin's cheapest tier often doesn't either.

Given this series runs 9 December through 8 January, spanning Boxing Day and New Year — Australia's two busiest domestic travel weeks of the year — book every leg as early as your itinerary allows, not close to the date. Prices on Melbourne-Sydney around Boxing Day in particular climb well before the actual holiday period starts.