Australia Journal 2025

We're back home and reflecting on our 19th visit to Australia, an almost-annual tradition for us that started in 2007.

Most of our trips have been made largely for the purpose of attending the annual FlyerTalk Oz Fest, a "Do" that's one of the longest-running and most successful of the get-togethers organized in various parts of the world by and for members of FlyerTalk. 

We've flown in excess of 250,000 miles to and from Oz over the years, roughly 10% of our total flight miles. We've visited most if not all of the major cities, and have been fortunate enough to see more of Australia than many Australians have. 

Australia is a vast country that's much more varied geographically than one might imagine. We've experienced Sydney, Melbourne, Broome, Darwin, Tasmania, Hamilton Island, the Red Centre and Uluru (Ayers Rock), an overnight stay on a tourist pontoon on the Great Barrier Reef, a tour of the Outback, a helicopter ride over the Great Ocean Road and much more, including wine regions ranging from Hunter Valley to Barossa to McLaren Vale to the Mornington Peninsula.

Australia is not a cheap country to visit. At the moment the exchange rate is favorable to U.S. (and even to Canadian) visitors, which helps us tourists considerably. If we calculate two thirds of the price of something in Australian dollars, we end up with the approximate equivalent in U.S. dollars. 

Australians themselves are friendly and hospitable. They are confident of their identity and comfortable with their place in the world. Our visits to Oz Fest are reunions with friends, some of whom we've known for nearly 20 years. We've also had more than a dozen members and their families visit us over the  years. 

What did we do in Australia this year? Quite a bit for a short visit. It started with friends helping us out as we carried on a day late after our diverted and cancelled LAX-SYD flight, as mentioned in our previous post.

Qantas flew us from Los Angeles to Brisbane to Sydney, as per their agreement with American, but would not change our destination to Melbourne. This would cause us to miss our plane, train and bus connections to Sale, the small town about a four-hour drive from Melbourne where we were planning to visit old friends Bill and Sue. 

Bill was a Royal Australian Air Force pilot and flight instructor, and subsequently the Chief Pilot for Esso Australia, flying helicopters to offshore oil rigs. Does he have stories!

Damon, another friend and an organizer of this particular Oz Fest, paid us back too generously for some U.S. flight arrangements we'd made for him by arranging tickets for us on a Qantas Brisbane to Melbourne non-stop flight.

Damon, a high-powered business consultant in real life who travels to many parts of the world, also made time to pick us up at the Melbourne Airport and drive us to Sale, where we all went out for dinner with Bill and Sue. Our understanding hosts made us comfortable and realized that what we needed most was sleep. Two days later after a low-key visit, just what we needed, they drove us to the nearest train station, saving us a bus ride, and we quite enjoyed riding the small commuter train back to Melbourne. 

Sue waved goodbye from the platform.

From the Southern Cross train station, we first tried to travel to our hotel by tram (streetcars are still popular and well used here), before giving up and catching and booking an Uber. We found Ubers plentiful and reasonably priced in Melbourne.

The Next Hotel, part of the Curio Collection by Hilton, had upgraded us in advance to an attractive suite. 

We made good use of the Executive Lounge for evening drinks and appetizers, and for morning Cappuccinos. The location was excellent, nearby Melbourne's cute little Chinatown, and a plethora of tempting Asian restaurants. 

During our stay, we mainly wandered around the downtown core, and met another FlyerTalk friend, Iain and his wife, for an enjoyable dumpling lunch in one of the restaurants only a block or so from our hotel. 

The menu included our favorites, Xaio Long Bao, or Soup Dumplings. 

The food was so tasty that we returned the next day for an encore. Asian food tends to be reasonably priced in Australia and of good quality. 

Yum Cha (literally "drink tea") lunches in Australia are like the Dim Sum (literally "touch the heart" to describe the small food items accompanying tea) lunches we find at home, a variety of dumplings and other food items (chicken feet, anyone?) offered as mid-day meals. 

We also took Damon to lunch at Flower Drum, one of the most venerable Cantonese restaurants in Melbourne, featuring elegant service provided by well-dressed waiters.

Damon reciprocated by taking us to dinner at France-Soir, a boisterous bistro or brasserie more French than France with excellent food and a dictionary-sized wine list perused here by our host.

During our Melbourne stay, we also rode the free tourist tram, checked out the Queen Victoria Market, and spent a couple of pleasant hours strolling around the Melbourne Botanical Gardens. The weather was generally good throughout our trip. 

We flew to Adelaide on Virgin Australia, staying at the Adelaide Hilton for the second and last time before it undergoes a sale and a brand change. The Adelaide Central Market was a short walk from the Hilton and seemed livelier than Melbourne’s.

Truth in advertising…

We enjoyed all of the Oz Fest activities, including a Saturday bus trip to a wildlife park and a couple of wineries, along with three tasty group dinners that included a round of Happy Birthday to Kathy and a candle on her dessert Saturday night.

We didn’t know that feral camels, introduced as beasts of burden in the 19th century, still roam Australia, creating problems necessitating a major culling program in 2009, slaughtering 160,000 while sparing 300,000, including these lucky ones.

An observant meerkat caught our eye.

The best place to spot a koala is a zoo.

A charming young Italian led us through a D’Anenberg wine tasting at their newish Cube building.

“Happy Birthday to you…”

We returned to Sydney Monday in the first and only bad weather we saw during our entire stay. There was some risk of flight delays but the weather eased off and our flight was close to on time.

We spent the last night at the Rydges Sydney Airport property located directly across from the International Terminal. The hotel's restaurant and bar both appeared mediocre and over-priced (maybe we were just spoiled by all of the good food we'd been enjoying) but a little joint named Mach 2, located landside in the International Terminal, was rated as the Number One area restaurant by Trip Advisor, and we walked over there for an enjoyable and reasonably priced Italian dinner.

Kathy was up much of the night, trying to conquer time zones and eventually changing our next day’s 12-hour layover at SEA to a more manageable 3 hours, thanks to an online chat with an Alaska agent.

We checked in for our American (AA) flight early enough to enjoy Eggs Benedict, along with the view and a glass of Champagne, in the Qantas First Lounge before our 9:30 AM departure.

Our flights home - SYD-LAX-SEA-BLI - were largely uneventful. Alaska provided complimentary upgrades to First on our flight from LAX to SEA, a good time to score them after our 13-hour transoceanic flight. 

Eventually we found ourselves flying past islands during the short hop from Seattle to Bellingham on a gorgeous Northwest day.

Our next-door neighbors picked us up at BLI and delivered us to our doorstep on a sunny afternoon. Thanks Bob and Carmen, and thanks Laurie, our other neighbor who drove us to the airport way back on May 13.

Three days later we're still adjusting our sleep patterns, sleeping and napping whenever we feel like it. 

It's always good to be back home in our own bed, with plans for the 2026 Oz Fest in Darwin already percolating.

Our Australian Trip That Almost Wasn’t

We’re writing this in our Melbourne hotel. Yes, we made it to Australia, but it was touch and go more than once.

Our first challenge occurred at the Bellingham Airport of all places. We discovered that our Australian ETA app was not working.

The young Alaska employee was less than helpful, and made it clear she wouldn’t let us on the plane to sort out in Seattle.

We remembered we’d received a confirming email from the Australian government, retrieved it from storage, and presented it to her.

This was the only occasion in our dealings over many years with Alaska Airlines that we sensed an employee wasn’t trying actively to assist us. In any case, she printed out boarding passes for all three flights and we flew to Seattle, then onward to LAX.

Our research reveals a lot of problems with this app, including this one occurring during the same time.

Once we’d traversed the tunnels and arrived at the international terminal, we dined in the Qantas First Lounge, a nice benefit of holding OneWorld Emerald status.

Eventually we made another long walk to the American gate where our LAX-SYD flight would board.

We boarded and got settled in. Kathy’s seat wasn’t working properly, but she kept that information to herself until we were well in the air, given that passengers are sometimes transferred into economy seats in such situations for safety reasons.

We decided to eat dinner on this 13-hour flight before sleeping, a schedule that helps us adjust to the 17-hour time difference.

We were just dozing off a little over two hours into the flight when the pilot announced we had turned around and were returning to LAX.

It was impossible to heat the cockpit, and the temperature had already dropped to 50 degrees F (about 10 C) with 11 hours of flying to go. We were landing at LAX about 3:30 AM.

Soon, those of us with American apps got the message we’d been rescheduled to an 8:00 AM flight. Bravo AA!

Unfortunately this was not true. When we.landed, confusion abounded.The AA reps eventually announced that this was a sort of phantom message. Not to worry though, because the system would rebook us automatically once our original flight was officially cancelled.

Yeah, sure…

While we stood in line at a nearby American lounge to rebook, we connected with an AA phone agent who booked us on a Qantas business class itinerary via Brisbane to Sydney.

At this point, we were issued hotel vouchers for the Sonesta Hotel. Here’s a travel hint: don’t stay there. Between a one-hour wait for a shuttle, a lengthy check-in ordeal, and a saggy mattress, we were quite happy to return to LAX a few hours after our 5:30 AM arrival at the hotel.

The Qantas counter wasn’t open yet, so we passed the time with ten-dollar Cappuccinos in paper cups. Our AA meal vouchers wouldn’t work either.

Finally at the Qantas counter, we discovered we were seated in different parts of the business cabin, despite what the AA rep had told us. We had reached our last straw, and almost cancelled the trip.

Fortunately we carried on. At the Qantas Business Lounge, a young employee listened to our tale of woe and found us seats across the aisle from each other in Row 2, a perfectly satisfactory arrangement. Why the agent at the front counter couldn’t accomplish that 15 minutes earlier is beyond us.

We dined for the second consecutive night in the Qantas First Lounge (we recommend the Minute Steaks with Chipotle butter), boarded our Qantas 787, and fell asleep as soon as we were airborne.

After a number of ups and downs, we were on our way to Australia.

At the Airport: To Lounge or Not

 

We’ve visited airport lounges frequently over the past couple of decades of post-retirement flying.

Once we started flying regularly with United Airlines in the early 2000s, we bought a membership in what was then known as the Red Carpet Club, later imaginatively renamed the United Club. We were mainly flying out of Seattle, and often connecting to smaller airports with a change of plane along the way. It was not that uncommon for us to visit up to three lounges in one day of flying, and we made good use of our membership.

But what enticed us to pay? The single most useful feature for us was free internet connectivity. We had no smartphones, and ordinarily carried a small laptop for communication. Few if any airports provided free internet, so the lounge became the place where we could catch up on email and check flight status.

The second enticement was having a quiet place to sit. United Clubs offered little or no food and charged for alcohol. As United started to offer one-day lounge passes and their lounges became more crowded, that feature was less compelling. On top of that, some airports (but certainly not all) have undergone remodeling that, along with free internet, makes their gates more attractive places to hang out before a flight.

The third feature of United Clubs is the ability of employees, sometimes referred to as concierges, who can help with everything from seats to missed connections to possible upgrades. Alaska lounge employees are not allowed to provide the same level of assistance (it’s apparently a contractual matter), so if there’s a problem we still have to contact a telephone agent or the service desk within the airport.  

Our status levels, first on United and Star Alliance, and later on Alaska and OneWorld, afford us lounge access  for international itineraries, allowing us to enjoy a drink, to eat “real” food, or sometimes to dine restaurant-style on high-quality cuisine, and even to take a shower, a welcome treat between long flights.

“Free” access is of course a no-brainer, but whether it's worth paying the ever-increasing membership fees  is very much an individual decision. We paid for an Alaska Lounge membership for one year, and didn’t really feel we got our money’s worth out of it.

For the past couple of years, Alaska has allowed members who annually fly 100,000 miles (MVP Gold 100Ks) to choose a Lounge Plus membership from a list of options as a reward and we’ve done that. That gives us admittance to Alaska Lounges, and the “+” adds entry to American Airlines lounges when we’re flying either airline.

Alaska maintains three quite pleasant lounges at SEA, and the first thing that comes to mind about them is the ability to order a barista-made double-shot Cappuccino. That spoils us for coffee almost anywhere else. SEA in particular has been experiencing long security delays, and even with TSA PreCheck we plan to arrive at the airport well in advance of departure. A lounge is, at best, a kind of refuge, from SEA's ongoing and protracted "enhancements."

All of this came to mind when we read a recent article in Fodor’s Travel, Airline Lounges Are a Crowded Waste of Time. It’s hard to disagree with anything written there.

We’re leaving in a couple of days for our 19^th trip to Australia, 17 of which have been largely for the purpose of attending the FlyerTalk Oz Fest, a get-together or “Do” organized by local volunteer FT members for fellow frequent flyers. Many Australians have told us we've seen more of their large country than they have.

We’ll see what lounges we visit along the way.