15/1/2012

I had been waiting with baited breath for the last two years, to go back to New Zealand but only really started planning my trip in August this year. After a variety of circumstances, mostly work related, I decided to check out flights and finally booked my flight in August. Now I wanted to stay with friends of mine in Melbourne, Australia en route to New Zealand but needed a short stopover between Amsterdam and Melbourne, because that was going to be a 22 hour flight. So I enrolled the help of a good friend of mine and seasoned traveller, Rayan, to help me find a reasonably priced flight.

We looked at various options and there are so many, but in the end Rayan found a  very reasonable flight with Emirates. I’d heard that Emirates are a good airline to fly with. I was going to be travelling to New Zealand in the summer/autumn time so I knew that flights were going to be expensive. We found a flight going from Amsterdam to Dubai to Melbourne in January. Then for the return leg, it would be a direct flight back, so to speak. The flight would be from Christchurch, to Sydney, to Bangkok, to Dubai, to Amsterdam in March, with no overnight stopovers. So the whole ticket cost 1200 euros. Pretty good for summer season. But I still had to book a flight from Melbourne to Christchurch.

Jetstar Airlines offer pretty cheap one way flights between Australia and New Zealand, so I then booked a flight from Melbourne to Christchurch, which brought the price of the whole ticket to 1400 euros. Finally in January, I was on my way to Dubai.

The flight took 6 and a half hours and I got to the hotel at 1am. Now I had booked the Golden Sands Hotel Apartments in September, with Booking.com and everything was hunkey dorey, or so I thought. I got an email from Booking.com in December to say that my credit card details weren’t valid, which were true, as I had gotten a new credit card since I had booked the hotel. After updating the credit card details on Booking.com, I checked through the dates of the hotel booking and realised that I had mistakenly booked for 2 nights. My flight to Melbourne was the next day at 03.00am, so I had to cancel the second night in Dubai. It meant that I only had 1 day in Dubai instead of 2. It was such a shame but it just meant that I would have to get back to Dubai another time.