At the end of a great stay in Port Douglas, our next stop was Canberra to see friends. You can’t fly direct so we were always going to have to stop somewhere. A quick search on Google Flights showed our Qantas options (because we wanted to use Avios) were between a change in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The former was out as it would mean doubling back on ourselves, and the latter has fewer flights to Canberra, so Sydney was the optimum choice.

ExpertFlyer is where I then looked to see what was available.

Ignore the date on this – it is the same as when we flew. The point of this is that it highlights the aircraft type and therefore the cabin layout. I know that the 320 in the Aircraft column of the first flight is an Airbus A320 which is a narrow-bodied, single aisle aircraft. seats on the this in Business tend to be 2 by 2 large recliners which are fine, shown here on Seatguru.com as the same as the Boeing 737:

However, the 332 is an Airbus A330-200 wide-bodied, twin aisle jet with lie-flat business class seats.

For the same price, why wouldn’t you go for the more spacious and comfortable option?!

The cabin was very clean and beautifully designed. It was off-set so whilst each seat had the same floor area, some were closer to the aisle or window than others. There was plenty of storage space, power sockets and a large video screen. One thing that really irked me what that on all the aircraft save BA, I had to use the supplied headphones with the three prongs as my single 3.5mm jack wouldn’t work. I have a really comfortable pair of Beats noise cancelling headphones and I hate lugging them around with me and not being able to use them!

The flight was a lunchtime one, so I didn’t have anything to eat in the lounge before, as I always like to eat on the plane; mostly out of the lovely factor! Big mistake.

You see, I dont eat meat;  to cut a long story short, one Christmas a few years ago, we did the rounds up from London to all our family and friends – 10 days on the road comprised about 25 meals of roast meat and by the end of it I’d had enough, and haven’t eaten it since. Fish is still good, and I do love a veggie sausage. However, Qantas still seem to be in the 1940s where meat and two veg is standard, so there was a choice of chicken or beef. End of. And even then, the meat was so mushed into the meal there was no hope in hell of picking it out – I am not fussy like that. So I had to wait for the lounge in Sydney.

The rest of the flight was fine, and the crew were polite, but it was a bit odd. Thankfully, I was able to speak with someone in the lounge in Sydney to request a vegetarian meal for our Melbourne to Perth flight later on in the trip.

The Sydney lounge was a good place to while away the time between flights. There was an earlier flight on a Dash-8, a small propeller plane which has smaller overhead locker spaces (important if you have a large bag!), but the agent on the phone when booking suggested we might be more comfortable with the later connection so we had 145mins instead of 8omins.

Boarding took place on time, but the cancellation of the 1935 Dash-8 flight meant we had to wait for those passengers to try to board, be redirected to us and get on the plane. In the end we were sat on the tarmac at Sydney for longer than the flight took which was annoying; even the stewardess was getting angry. However, that didn’t stop the service from being good, and I still managed a G&T and tomato and lentil salad on the short hop. Another perfectly fine Qantas flight!