No business

-

For the past two trips, I've been flying business class from KL to Australia on my annual trip to spend time with my sister's family. The chief reason was that I can't sleep well during night flights (I'll come back to this later).

However, this year, while looking at various flights, I noticed that there are day flights. The price difference between business and econocy class was over RM 6k and RM 7k for MAS and SIA respectively. I was like, wait a minute: surely an overnight stay in Melbourne would cost no where near there, right? Yup, it cost about RM 300 per person at Holiday Inn Melbourne Airport , rated 8.2 on Booking.com and 4.1 star by Google reviews. It is 8-min walk away and provides free on-demand shuttle bus to-and-fro the airport.

Hence, I went ahead to book a day flight. Since it's during the day, I'll likely be spending substantial amount of time walking shows/movies in flight, instead of only sleeping (as I do on night flights). Mainly for that reason, I chose to fly Singapore Airlines as their entertainment system was way superior to Malaysia Airlines's. Actually, it was the latter's sytem that need to upgraded/repaired/refurbished: poor sound quality and insensitive touch screen. Curiously, its economy class is cheaper than that of MAS.

There will be a 55-min layover in Singapore, where we don't need to check out and instead just go straight to the boarding gate of the connecting. Our luggage will be checked through to Melbourne at KLIA were we take the first flight. This will be a first for me. I'm a little nervous about the mere 55-min duration but I trust that SIA has done this many times before without major issues.

Shortly later, I realised that I did know of the day flights, as stated in this post two years ago.  So what changed?

  • There is no discount for business class this time.
  • Hotel might be cheaper now. Also, review might have improved. Not too sure because I didn't keep record of these two years ago.
Whatever the case, clearly this time there is a huge difference in cost to switch from busines class to economy class + overnight stay at hotel. It also helps that my experience flying with SIA last year was great. I hope it's not just because it was an Airbus 380 plane. This time, it is still Airbus 380 for the Sydney - Singapore flight but it's Airbus 350 for the Singapore-Melbourne flight.
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark - character build (Part 1)

-
Here are the character builds for my current run (with the help of Ban): Kyrie Fellblade/Marked Counter: Slow Secondary passives: Execute, Life Font Fellblade itself is a good class because of the various conditions it can inflict and most importantly they can inflict Sleep. Iirc, the only other human class that can do this is Gadgeteer. Their passive Malice increases the chance of landing it by 10%. Fellblade pairs well with Marked because both use ATK and MND in their offensive abilities. Also, Fellblade's abilities are mostly short range whereas Marked has some long range abilities. Execute for more damage. Life Font is for suvivability. Ban opined that with two healers, there's no need for Life Font but I discover that it enables Kyrie to survive just enough for a healer to heal her up, after having received massive damage. Ban advocated for Marked/Fellblade for superior Speed (1.00 vs 0.92) and defense (heavy armor). I resisted this for a long time because I
Read more

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark - character build (Part 2)

-
(continue from Part 1 ) Yates Anatomist/Wizard Counter: Cripple Secondary passives: Blessed One, Smart Casting Anatomist is the best healer in game due to the passive Legendary Healer, which also then boost the amount of self-healing by Blessed One. Although Ban thinks Anatomist's Dark spells are sufficient in dealing damage and so he suggests Alchemyst as Yate's secondary class, I choose Wizard for the following reasons: Quite often, demonic creatures have Dark immunity and other creatures have immunity to other elements. So having Dark, Water, Fire, Earth and Thunder spells enable Yates to cast the most suitable spell, especially when the enemies are vulnerable to certain elements. Flexible casting :) Smart Casting is useful so that I don't need to worry much about the positioning of the enemies relative to my other characters when using Mass Healing and the area effect damage spells. As stated in previous post , there "are so many devastating Skill ba
Read more

Sudden lower body pain

-
About two weeks ago, my mum developed pain in her pelvic bone, much more on the right side, and squeezing pain in her legs, with occassional spike in pain. She was managing it with paracetamols, 2 tabs three times daily.  Since we didn't know any particular orthopedist in private hospitals (it was only recently that I remember Dr Prashant ), I targeted one at KPJ Penang Specialist Hospital since it's in mainland Penang (instead of on the island). I made appointment for my mum with Dr Joehaimey since he has the earliest suitable date. The moment she walked through his door, he immediately asked her whether the pain from her right side. We were both quite impressed. He was in turn impressed with mum's prepared list of medication that she presented to him on a piece of paper. The key information seems to be the surgery she had back in 2011 to insert titanium plate and screws in her lower spine. He guessed that there's accumalated wear and tear due to aging. So to confirm i
Read more