Suzy prefers Virgin to Qantas. While she'd been working for MYOB, she was a regular traveller with Virgin to head office in Melbourne and elsewhere. Her Velocity membership still gives her access to the Virgin lounge. Besides if we'd flown with Qantas we would have gone to Dubai - we've been to Dubai on a previous trip but we've never been to Abu Dhabi.
Originally we'd booked to fly premium economy but later realised that we had enough points to upgrade to business class. This would make the long trip more comfortable. The plan was to stop over in Abu Dhabi for a couple of days to break the journey up. Then we will be visiting the following counties:
- Serbia (Belgrade)
- Austria (Vienna)
- Czech Republic (Prague)
- Slovakia
- Poland (Krakow)
- Hungary (Budapest)
- Romania (Bucharest etc)
It was an easy trip to the airport and the airport wasn't busy. It was a good time of the day to be flying out.
At the Virgin check-in, the clerk was very helpful and asked which countries we would be visiting. She then proceeded to check whether we needed a visa for any of those countries. It turns out that this is now part of what they need to do at check-in. As we suspected, we didn't need any visas because we were only staying for a short time at each destination.
After going through customs, we went to the TRS counter to claim back the GST on the new DSLR camera I bought a few weeks ago. This proved to be very quick because there were three or four staff at the counter but no queue.
Virgin co-shares with Etihad and so we went to the Etihad lounge (which turned out to be close to our departure gate). This lounge was amazing - by far the best airline lounge I'd ever been to anywhere in the world.
More importantly, they have a table-service dining area. This wasn't just cheap airline food - it was fine dining with beautiful food and wine. The portions were not too big - just what we needed for a lunch before our flight. If we'd wanted more, we could serve ourselves from the buffet and bar. This was really impressive. A great start to our flight.
The flight took off close to schedule. Suzy had booked seats at the front of business class because she'd read online that these were the best seats. They served a very nice lunch soon after we took off and a supper just before we landed.
After lunch, they offered to make up our beds for us. You could adjust the seats so they were flat and horizontal. Then they pulled out mattresses from the overhead lockers to make it even more comfortable. They provided pyjamas too - Suzy changed into her pyjamas but I didn't bother.
Suzy can sleep anywhere at any time and so she managed to get a few hours sleep and then some more sleep later in the flight. Mine was more like a cat nap for a couple of hours.
They had an extensive choice of movies and TV shows to watch on touch-screen monitors that were built into the seats.
It was close to midnight local time in Abu Dhabi by the time we landed. Surprisingly, the plane parked on the tarmac away from the terminal building and we had to walk down the stairs to a shuttle bus.
Our hotel driver was waiting for us after we'd got through customs and drove us to the Radisson Blu Hotel on Yas Island. This only took about 15 minutes.
As you would expect, this is a very nice hotel with a spacious foyer, large rooms and excellent service. By the time we'd got to bed it was 1:30am local time and 7:30am Sydney time - more than 24 hours after we'd last been to bed.
Our holiday adventure was underway and the first day had been a great start.
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