1) Don’t go
Flying may have been exciting once but it’s now about as thrilling as trailing in the wake of my wife around Marks and Spencer’s. Forget the airport; catch a ferry, hop on a bus or take the train. On the planet’s surface you can see where you’re going and feel how far you’ve travelled and do it with the ability to stretch your legs or read a newspaper. If of course (like me) you’ve made your home in New Zealand then inevitably you do need to get up to 30,000 feet at some point, but it doesn’t have to be all the way. From China I found an interesting and inexpensive route through Hong Kong and Fiji, and when we moved from there to Kazakhstan I returned home by flying over the Himalayas to Delhi, and then travelling overland to southern India where I caught a low-cost flight to Singapore. Flying should be the last resort to get anywhere.
2) Big isn’t beautiful
When the plane is the only option choose to fly from a small regional airport rather than an international hub. They are often staffed by people who have retained some degree of human characteristics and where it can still be possible to persuade yourself that you are on a journey and not being processed for admission to Wormwood Scrubs. Even when they arrange for all the days flights to take off at the same time to reduce manning costs, it is hugely preferable to the crush of somewhere like Sydney. Last week on my way back to Malaysia I joined a long queue to check-in, which qualified me to go to the next stage of a much larger mass of people awaiting inspection at immigration, so that I could then join the army needing to have all their possessions x-rayed. Thankfully they caught the man in front of me who clearly intended to blow us all to kingdom come with his half used tube of toothpaste.
3) Arrive later
There is a presumption that because flying is usually expensive all the documentation should be laborious. Why is it that a train ticket can be bought in 30 seconds but the equivalent for a plane takes 30 minutes? And then, ironically for a mode of transport that has nothing but speed in its favour, another 30 minutes to get from the terminal entrance to the departure gate. But then they say you should be there 3 hours before the flight time! Cut that to 60 minutes and the check-in queue is shorter, and you can arrive in the departure lounge just as the passengers who are worried that they may be forced to stand all the way are forming yet another queue to be first on the aircraft.
4) Don’t trust the airport
Airports are in monopoly situations and they are open to all manner of ways to rip-off their customers. Just getting there you are expected to pay a premium on any public transport; most blatantly in Sydney where there is a gate fee to get onto the railway. In the terminal some airports do dodgy deals giving monopolies to organisations such as banks, food outlets and of course the duty free shop. Don’t assume that you can always save money in these as they vary greatly depending on whether or not there is any competition and all work on huge mark-ups. Do the arithmetic as it is quite easy to pay more for duty free than you can buy the same item for in the country that you are visiting. The only organisations who expect you to pay more for nothing are the currency exchange people; always look at how large the difference is between the buying and selling rates and then take money out of the ATM instead.
5) Be careful what you smuggle
I usually travel with just hand luggage and assume that the people with huge suitcases are either moving house or smuggling something. Hallucinogenic drugs and machine guns are probably a bad idea to try to take into any country but beyond that you need to know who you are dealing with. In New Zealand for example the main threat to national security is perceived to be from apples. There is a team of highly trained sniffer dogs who earn the government a lot of money by catching miscreants trying to sneak into the country with a Braeburn or Cox’s Orange Pippin. But I doubt that anyone would take the risk for the sake of a Golden Delicious.
