After five long years of battling the Dubai stopover on route to London, Qantas will finally be reverting their flight path back to a Singapore stopover.
The surprising move comes via the shifting nature of the Qantas-Emirates alliance in which CEO Alan Joyce explained that the partnership was “evolving to a point where Qantas no longer needs to fly its own aircraft through Dubai, and that means we can redirect some of our A380 flying into Singapore and meet the strong demand we’re seeing in Asia”.
The change has also been seen as a collective win for local passengers and more specifically its business travellers who prefer the Singapore stopover to the Dubai one.
Sydney-based retail buyer Leigh Baxter told High Flyer that “the flight schedule is definitely a plus for Singapore” and that she had moved her patronage to Singapore Airlines after Qantas announced their London route via Dubai.
“I can work and relax during the seven daytime hours from Sydney to Singapore, and then the 14 hour overnight leg to London is my chance to really sleep and get into the UK timezone,” she explained.
“Dubai pretty much flipped that around. The long flight to Dubai was quite a drag and the seven hour leg to London, during which the crew serve supper and breakfast, is good for only a nap rather than a proper sleep.”
It wasn’t all positive news though. Passengers like Dr. Fiona Downes who travels to London three times a year said that she preferred the Dubai stopover.
“I like having a longer leg flying back into Australia from Europe, those short overnight flights from Asia make it very hard to get a decent rest,” she said.
Downes, who often uses her frequent flyer points to upgrade from business class to first class, also thinks that the Emirates lounge in Dubai is far superior to the Qantas lounge at Singapore.
“Neither the Qantas or British Airways lounges in Singapore come anywhere close to what’s offered at Dubai in terms of food, service and ease of access to boarding.”
Others like Dr. Henry Woo who works as a North Sydney specialist says that the short flight time from Singapore to Sydney is a bit of a nuisance.
“The flight is only seven hours and at an absolute maximum, the best you could get would be a five for six hour sleep on these overnight flights,” he told Executive Style.
“For me, this amount of rest doesn’t allow for high-level functioning on the day of return so effectively a business day is lost.”
The final Dubai stopover for a Qantas flight to London will be the 24th of March.