Pre-wedding Honeymoon in Europe

[elanshin]

Inspired by @HirafuHeartAttack 's trip report, I thought I'd give this another try. With our wedding in January coming up and busy Christmas season we'll be jetting off for a holiday before all of that craziness in just over a week. This trip was booked as part of a OWA J that started on NYE and is the 5th stopover of the ticket.

Previous Sectors in the OWA:

• KUL-SIN-HND (Holiday over the new years to Japan)
• HND-SYD
• SYD-ZQN (Getaway to Queenstown and South Island - got some engagement shots done there)
• CHC-SYD-MEL (Initially Direct, however changed to go via SYD after schedule changes).

Upcoming Trip OWA J Sectors in Bold.

• MEL-SYD-HKG (QF) - HEL-LHR (AY)
• LHR - PRG (BA, Y)
• VIE - BCN (VY, Y)
• Train from Barcelona to Paris to Amsterdam (SNSF overnight + Eurostar)
• AMS-HEL-HKG (AY)-KUL (CX)
• KUL - SIN (MH, Y)
• SIN - SYD (SQ J)

This is our final "stop" of the OWA for 2025. Initially I wanted to take CX direct to LHR (and could even see the CR flight) but alas QF call centre could not see it. I was hoping that we could've had the Aria Suite to LHR but we'll settle for AY Business. We'll only be staying in London for a few days before jetting off to Prague. I've always wanted to go to more Eastern European cities and whilst Prague isn't quite as Eastern, it's much further east in Europe than we've been. We'll pick another time to go even further east (maybe next year - planning another OWA right now).

From Prague we'll head via train to Vienna and thanks to ChatGPT I have now realised we'll be in time for their Christmas Markets as they start mid November. I was quite tempted to book a Ryanair flight to Barcelona from Vienna (or Prague) but the Vuelling times and prices were ever so slightly better - so it's time to see how IB's LCC does. Barcelona was the one place my partner requested as she loved the city when she last went a decade ago with her family.

We'll then travel by train to Latour de carol in the pyrenees borders before taking an overnight train to Paris and connecting Eurostar to Amsterdam. I could have chosen to fly, but instead felt like opting for the scenic train route. In hindsight after more research, I realised I should've booked to fly to BCN first then take the overnighter from Vienna to Amsterdam instead on the OBB overnight as it was a much nicer train - but hopefully we get some good views of the Spanish/French pyrenees to make up for it.

Our time in Amsterdam is relatively brief as it was just one of the cities that had award space open to connect into helsinki and I wanted to check out the Van Gough Museum. We'll try and spend a few hours in Helsinki and check out some suggestions by Matt before getting into Hong Kong for an overnight stay and KL. I'm hoping that CX will through check our bags to SIN at KUL even though it's on separate tickets.

Singapore is the last stop before heading home for my grandmother's 90th in Sydney. We'll be attending a convention which also conveniently is work related so I can claim some of the costs. Looking forward also to trying the SQ a380 J seats.

Hopefully I can try to keep this report up to date as we go around Europe.

 

[elanshin]

Just to add, we'll be Accor heavy for this trip so I'll see how they stack up in Europe.

 

[HirafuHeartAttack]

Just to add, we'll be Accor heavy for this trip so I'll see how they stack up in Europe.

Another similarity to our trip! Best of luck. Very excited to tag along here.

 

[jase05]

Just to add, we'll be Accor heavy for this trip so I'll see how they stack up in Europe.

Set your standards to moderate and you won’t be disappointed. Unfortunately most Accor properties we have stayed at Europe have been not a patch on what you find in Asia, the ME and even Australia. There are some very good ones but have found them to be few and far between.

Best of luck and definitely tagging along for this one

 

[elanshin]

Set your standards to moderate and you won’t be disappointed. Unfortunately most Accor properties we have stayed at Europe have been not a patch on what you find in Asia, the ME and even Australia. There are some very good ones but have found them to be few and far between.

Best of luck and definitely tagging along for this one

Thanks, we'll end up at Swissotel Stamford in Singapore at the end of the trip so something to look forward to if everything else is terrible. No Crest Suite this trip though as we'll need to swing by Singapore sometime next year for a wedding and the SNU seems better value then.

 

[elanshin]

Will be flying down to MEL where my partner will meet me tomorrow night and staying at the airport for our early morning flight to SYD. Thought I might be able to move flights tomorrow night to a slightly earlier one until I got a notice about full flight and seeing EF showing Y0 for the majority of the evening flights. I think ACDC is on in Melbourne. Nothing fancy for Day 0. Melbourne accomodation felt a tad pricier so Ibis budget it is to start the trip out as it's closer to T1 than Novotel/Styles and Park Royale was full.

 

[elanshin]

Day 0.
Had to do a fair amount of work. Opened my Qantas app to see that flow forward was open and I could make the 18:25 flight to MEL. (A321XLR) So i pushed it forward and called an uber. 16min journey to the airport would've left me with about 20mins before bagdrop closed. Traffic on the M5 was green so I thought it would be fine.

Happily minding my own business as we went past SYD Int'l on Qantas Drive, when my uber driver suddenly decided he needed to cut across a couple of lanes and got honked at. I looked up just in time to see him take the turn off Qantas Drive onto the M8 on ramp .... And even though i pointed it out that was too late.


For those that know the area, once you get on the M8 on ramp, you can't get off until Beverley Hills (which coincidentally was where I came from). As soon as he made that mistake I knew I missed the flight. I could have made it if it was my normal SYD-MEL trip but alas, I had a suitcase to check in.

35mins later we pull up to T3 terminal just as QF465 was mostly done boarding. I thought I'd do the flight a favour and tell them exactly where I was and to just take me off the flight list when they called. Turns out that made it impossible for the service desk outside to take control of my ticket and move me. Luckily it wasn't too bad getting a hold of a call agent who moved me to the 20:00 departure.
Checked in to that flight, had a look at the seat map and saw an exit row seat open. SYD then proceeded to enter single runway operations which meant the flight was delayed.

I've never seen that many Group 1 and Group 2 boarding a flight before. Had to have been at least 40+ plats and even 15-20mins in I can seee the Gold's still boarding.

Rest of the evening was uneventful other than Melbourne being frozen and forgetting that Ibis budget doesn't have a lift. Time to get my travel e-sim and we'll see if we can't shuffle to an earlier flight tomorrow morning so we have more time at SYD F lounge.

 

[elanshin]

Day 1 - Travel day Part 1.
MEL-SYD

Woke up a bit early to see if we could move to an earlier flight, but unfortunately D-I agent denied that as there wasn't too many spare seats on the flights left. Incidentally we felt a bit silly going to the premium line which took significantly longer than the regular line. Interestingly our agent printed 2 different tags for our bags - MEL-SYD-HKG and HKG-HEL-LHR. Here's to hoping our bags will show up at LHR.

Nothing interesting to report besides the MEL dom J lounge's spice bar was open in the morning doing fried eggs with a salsa and chilli sauce. I don't remember the spice bar being open in the morning before but granted i haven't taken an early morning MEL flight for a while.

I reported the D-I transfer at SYD in the other thread as currently QF Gate 15 internal transfer isn't running. Overall fairly quick and efficient. Got through to QF First for breakfast and we caught Nestor on the way in and my partner got a selfie with him. Had about an hour to get some corn fritters and Turkish eggs in us before we were called for boarding.

Coffee and whisky, can't say I've had that combination too often at the start of a day.


Asianna A380 and QF A380 parked in front of us, although the QF bird was quickly towed away and a Xiamen 787 parked. Its amazing to see that even the 787s parked here looks small compared to the 777s and 380s. Scaffolding in front is the J lounge works downstairs.

SYD-HKG QF127
We sat at the gate for just over an hour waiting for the engineers to fix a data log issue according to our captain. It wasn't too bad and we were off into the air. No WiFi for this flight and the 333 (QPD) has seen better days but we'll leave the QF 330 fleet for another thread. I had no inseat power of any kind (both power plug and USB ports weren't working).
The hour delay meant we lost an hour of time at the Pier.

Menu for the flight

QF amenities kit to HKG. I believe there's a different bag for various routes.

Went for the Mushroom Soup for lunch which turned out great. Stir Fry Chicken was a bit average and the aalted caramel and blood orange for dessert was alright nothing I would ravr about. A couple of movies and nap later, we were descending into HKG. As we planned to goto Pier F for dinner, we skipped the light snacks before landing.





I'll post the other half of our journey to LHR once we get there. Currently 40 mins out from landing into HEL.

Fun fact my partner is in 2A for all 4 legs. (I'm in 3A for all the widebodies).