Flying home

Another trip to Melbourne is required. I booked an air fare this time. I just have to figure out how to get to and from the airport. There is an amazing amount you can do on the web. I don’t do a lot of air travel, and I was quite surprised; impressed in fact.

During my web browsing, I quickly lost faith with the WebJet and Flight Centre web sites, preferring to fly Virgin Blue. WebJet and Flight Centre, despite all you hear of them did not provide the cheapest fares. Their web sites do display a lot of options which is good, but they do like to grab some commission from you that you can avoid by going straight to the source. The Virgin web site was easy to use. I’m not sure if it was the cheapest, but at least there were no extra charges. Well, almost none. The prices seem to change and vary depending on the day of the week you want to travel.

Now, having got myself a flight organised I began to ponder the pros and cons of air travel vs. car travel. Travelling time by car between Canberra and Melbourne takes about 8 hours. The flight time for a trip between these two cities is a little less than an hour, or is it? Consider the following.

The drive to the airport from work will chalk up about 30 minutes, the flight time is a little less than an hour, and the drive from Tullamarine airport to Warrandyte is about an hour. It’s amazing how much time you can spend walking to and from car parks, so I’ll chalk that up to half an hour, and airport waiting around time is perhaps an hour, to say nothing of flight delays. All this adds up to about four hours for a one hour flight. In four hours I could have been half way to Melbourne.

Another interesting thing I noticed. On my web surfing, I had a choice of hopping aboard an international flight which stops over for domestic travellers. Well, I think that’s the arrangement, and because of the increased security for international flights passengers are required in the terminal 90 minutes prior to the flight; whereas Virgin require only 30 minutes. If I travelled Qantas my air tip starts to look like a five hour trip door to door. This all sounds like an argument to hop in the car and drive.

One of the great things I noticed with Virgin is that you can print your boarding pass anywhere you have access to the web, which can save you the hassle by avoiding one less queue. And if you are running really late and get to the airport just as the plane is boarding, you are still okay.