Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder,

mostly adjusted to the considerable jet lag of my journey back from Singapore.

But what I want to talk about today is choosing flights to and from Southeast Asia specifically Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and

Bangkok, because they are all pretty much in the same location and so what I'm going to propose

about flights to and from those destinations between the UK and there is I think reasonably

applicable to all three now the non-stop flight that I took from London Heath Road to

Singapore was a real pain it cost me a fortune 750 quid which was a real pain. It cost me a fortune, 750 quid, which was a lot more than I wanted to pay.

That's for the one way bit. I'll tell you about the inbound later. Now, it departed 80 minutes late.

It got later as it went on and so we were an hour and a half late and

that was pretty disagreeable because I'd chosen it as a really nice end of the week

640 p.m. flight out of Heathrow and you get on board you have a drink you have a meal and then you're in a good position to rest and go into your kind of normal sleep routine

and then hopefully get a fair amount of sleep and get to Singapore well by four o'clock the following afternoon that didn't happen

it was half past five and it was really quite late by the time everybody got on

board they said it was plane was late back out of maintenance it was also one

that you had to board with a bus and so so from all points of view, it was a disagreeable experience. And a very long one as well, about 13 hours to cover that distance. And that, of course, is because there are no direct flights anymore, because the absolute main track would go over eastern

Europe over Belarus over Russia, Kazakhstan and gets you there in certainly 12 hours.

That would be the suitable, the general sort of timing coming back I for

reasons of cash more than anything else because everything was expensive but I

booked a Qatar Airways flight stopping in Doha and that I think is preferable it saved a couple of hundred quids so

that was definitely preferable but in terms of the actual journey and how you feel I

think it was the way to do it flights from Singapore and this also applies from Bangkok and from Kuala Lumpur as well,

are taking up to sort of 14 hours to get to the UK.

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