We had a good time in Melbourne airport lounge. Nice food & wine.

The lounge in Melbourne


Some of the very nice food in the Lounge (yummy)


A large glass of Cognac to go with my smoked duck.



Our flight to Dubai was about 14 hours or so and it was very nice compared to Economy class.



Chris slept for at least 8 hours on the flight, Pam about 7 hours.

Once in Dubai we had another lounge and we were only there for 3 hours.....

We flew business class on Qantas and Emirates to London. This means lounge access and a nice seat alone with good food and drinks.

Qantas is severely lacking on Christchurch to Melbourne. The plane was small , a 737 with 12 business class seats.

The seat was large and quite comfortable.

The food was pretty sad for Business class I thought.

here is the promotional photo


I guess my dish looks similar. But nothing flash

Very sad looking headphones, not wrapped, probably not cleaned, and ripped.

After an early start to drop the dogs and cats to their temporary homes, dogs in Erwell forest and the cats in Mairehau we were picked up by Rebecca and off to the airport.

We arrived early at about 10:30am, but the check-in counter did not open until 11am.

No problem with check-in an we go our boarding passes from CHC-MEL, MEL-DBX, DBX-LGW

We then went to security but found it closed to 12:30pm, it was only about 11:15am so sitting around was a pain especially since we had lounge access.

Security when it finally opened was pretty quick.


The photo above was taken out the aircraft window on my phone.

Trying to check-in on Emirates web site and it says since the first flight is on Qantas so you must check in on their site.

It has a link to the Qantas site but it just shows me this

Clicking start over and manually going to the check-in option then wants me to enter the booking reference and my surname.

So I telephone Emirates and they say they don’t know the right booking reference for Qantas and I need to phone them.

So I telephone Qantas and get put on hold for 10 minutes before I speak to someone. But I can’t understand them since their phone cut out. So I have to make a new call and wait another 10 minutes on hold. I finally get someone and they tell me they can’t load the Emirates  booking reference. I tell her I have already done this and they don’t know. She then asks me for the reference and then hangs up.

Pam phoned the travel agent who gives us a new reference for Qantas but this did not work either.