There is no better way to get the airport than by limousine. Now if that sounds elitist, it’s not. It actually happens to be cheaper for 5 or 6 people to travel in a limo with door to door chauffeured service than to park at the airport or catch a shuttle bus.
choosing the right airline
We chose to fly Cathay Pacific to London and were very happy with our choice – unlike the previous year when we travelled with Thai Airways and received sullen, rude service and dreadful food the whole way. In fact, that Thai airways flight has turned me completely off white fish as, by the time the flight attendants got down to us, three-quarters into economy, there was nothing left but tasteless, horrible fish. Every time. On the way to Italy and back.
That experience made us realise that the airline you choose does matter because it’s a long flight and you want to arrive happy and positive. Not angry, starving and desperate for sleep.
get the details right!
Cathay Pacific was great though. I was a little concerned because we had low cost seats and didn’t realise when we booked (through a travel agent) that the price we had to pay for cheap seats was not being able to select our seats until 48 hours before the flight. As we had 5 of us travelling together, I envisaged our family being seated at random places all over the plane. Which is actually what happened with Thai Airways the previous year when we came back from Italy.
However, as it happened, we didn’t even have a choice of selecting seats 48 hours before the flight. Ten days before we were due to leave, Cathay Pacific changed its rules and decided that it would no longer accept tickets that were in a name not ‘totally identical’ to the names of passengers on their passports. As our travel agent had not included our middle names on our tickets, we weren’t able to confirm our seats online.
We only found this out on the Friday night before the Sunday when we were due to travel. I spent hours on the phone in a queue waiting to talk to someone at Cathay Pacific and, when I finally got through to a staff member, the news wasn’t good. Apparently, our tickets were not valid for our travel and we needed to get them changed before we would be allowed on the flight. Given we only had one day to arrange this, I was more than a little frantic.
The $200 per ticket for a name change wasn’t great news either but it was the last thing on my mind – missing our trip of a lifetime because of something so silly as a missing middle name was driving me insane.
great service from HelloWorld
Our travel agent at HelloWorld in Erina Fair was very helpful. She must have spent 4 hours trying to get an answer from Cathay Pacific while I was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair. Her advice was that it would ‘probably’ be okay because we had booked our tickets five months earlier – we just had to turn up at Check-In and hope for the best. She did assure me though that the change in policy was so new that Cathay Pacific hadn’t even advised the travel agents of the requirement – we knew before they did.
When we got to the airport it became apparent that we even knew before the staff at Cathay Pacific’s own Check-In! For all the worry, Check-In was a breeze. We were allowed to the head of the queue when I told the queue supervisor that we had tried to check in online but there was an issue. The lovely man at Check-In poo-pooed the idea of requiring middle names and in minutes, we were through. I wish I had known that 2 days earlier as I might have actually got some sleep!
It is definitely something that you should consider however. If you are booking through a travel agent and they tell you that they don’t need middle names, get them put them on just to be safe. If Cathay Pacific now requires tickets that perfectly match your passport, other airlines may also follow.
surviving the flight
Despite the hairy lead up, the flight to London on Cathay Pacific was actually great. We flew out at 2.10pm which was an ideal time. We made sure we didn’t sleep on the leg to Bangkok and instead, ate and watched back to back videos. By the time we arrived in Bangkok, we were very tired but we only had 2 hours to wait before the next flight. The airport at Bangkok is absolutely massive so just walking through to the right gate took up most of the stopping time anyway. Just make sure that your cabin baggage is easy to wheel and that you don’t have much to carry because, despite the moving walkways, it is a LONG trek from one end of the airport to the other.
By the time we boarded the flight to London, we were exhausted and slept a large chunk of the second leg. Some of the boys took night-time cold and flu tablets which helped to knock them out (not sure I am supposed to recommend that but it worked like a dream for them!) and when we arrived in London at 5.40am, we were in pretty good shape.
arriving without jetlag
We have twice travelled over to Europe on flights that have arrived early in the morning and I totally recommend it. If you can stay awake until around 3pm to 4pm on the day you arrive and then just have a short rest before dinner, sleeping at night is not a problem and jet lag really doesn’t happen. Coming back home however, it is a different story…
A word of advice on travelling between two countries on different sides of the world in case you’re new to it – it will be necessary on the flight to get changed, firstly because who wants to spend the first day of their holiday in stinky clothes, but secondly because the temperature change can hit you, particularly if it is raining as it was in London when we arrived. My plan is always to start getting changed on the flight 2 hours before the plane lands. The queue for the bathroom is smaller then and you don’t tend to annoy so many people by spending a bit of extra time refreshing and putting on your make up. We always have a stealthy program of getting five people through the bathroom one after another and then we can relax, enjoy the last meal and get excited about the landing.