Our Flights and Trip Home to Melbourne.

We have experienced several challenges with flights home to Melbourne following our 45 days of holidays including our cruises with NCL and Oceania.

But lets recap, we booked flights from London with the aim of stopover in Helsinki and then flying finnair to Singapore where we had booked 2 nights at Conrad Centennial, one of our favourite hotels. However , this was turned upsaid down with the issues associated with the Russian invasdion of Ukraine and airlines then redirecting flights from flying over Russia and then over areas such as Ukraine..

But that was only the first issue, the range of activities associated with the Queen Elizabeth funeral added a more diverse and complex situation with signatories flying from all over the world and then seeking to return or to delay return for a week or two.

This has impacted our situation quite dramatically and I will briefly summarise.

We had booked this whole trip through KissandFly,com a global facilitator of cheap business and economy travel.

We sought to return from London with Finnair, flying London to Helsinki , with a 4 hour stopover and then fly direct to Singapore, where we would stopover for 2 night at Conrad Centennial before flying home with our favourite Singapore Airlines.

Finnair has been particularly inconvenienced by the War and our first flight London to Helsinki, was cancelled. We were then rebooked with a later flight, but unfortunately that was to arrive 2 hours after our flight from Helsinki to Singapore had departed. But the knock on effect also meant that we would likely be a no show for the second flight, which would lead to cancellation of the third flight.

We were then forced to cancel , what were cheap Business class fares and substitute with flights that were very expensive.

Kissandfly.com were helpful although at the end of October we still haven’t received our refund of A$8,002 despite having been home for 4-5 weeks.

So we searched, found nothing or more expensive flights ranging from A$26,000-29,000 for 2 Business class flights.

We subsequently found flights on Sri Lankan Airlines with a Stopover for 12 hours in Columbo. We took this, after talking to Victor our usual agent, who said they are a very good airline. So we flew from London to Columbo then a long stopover and stay at a Transit Hotel then another 10 hour flight from Columbo to Melbourne for a cost of A$14,700 for 2 seats.

The stopover was fine although the rooms were dated. Our flights were excellent with good service and quality meals.

In simple terms we were just delighted to get back to Melbourne

We enjoyed the flights and were also quite relaxed after finding and experiencing that they are a very good airline.

We landed and checked thgough Immigration and customs using the e-commerce appland teminals. Unbelievably we were through and waiting for our luggage inside 10 minutes. Never seen this beforein Melbourne.

Our luggage arrived in the first group and we were pleased . We had one case with severely damaged wheels and a second with damage. We had used gaffer tape to repair and hold together. It worked well.

Gavin was coming through the Car park and we met him.

A very good trip home from London via Colombo to Melbourne. All worked well.

A Great holiday.