Travelling home from your destination can take quite a while, especially when you live in Australia and Europe is so far away. Last year I booked us home from Lisbon, via Dubai and Singapore. The second stop seems like it was unnecessary, but for some reason the Qantas website wasn’t giving me an option to go direct from Dubai (it partners with Emirates these days) to Melbourne. And this can be one of the tricky things with booking points flights, sometimes there are ‘blackout’ times in the year when you just can’t get the flight you want, no matter how common the flight is.

So to get home on points, we had to also go through Singapore, so that meant Lisbon-Dubai-Singapore-Melbourne would be our route with two stops. Then the connection just wasn’t there in Singapore, we would have to take an 8-9 hour wait in Changi before catching the Qantas flight home. Considering we would have already spent over 14 hours in the air on two flights, overnight, and considering I knew I just don’t sleep on most flights, I decided to look into booking a stay at the Changi Transit Hotel for some of the time we were transiting.

The Transit Hotel allows you to check-in for a certain amount of hours, and I think the shortest is six which is what we took. It turned out the lady at check-in was especially nice because she gave us an extra couple of hours on check-in for free.

The transit hotel is located in Terminal One, which was fortunate for us as we both arrived and left from Terminal One. Our arrival gate was quite a walk from the main area of the terminal, and I got us a bit lost actually looking for the hotel, but eventually we found it up an escalator not too far from the main shopping area of Terminal One.

The colour scheme was very brown. Different browns together, all the different browns represented with a little beige thrown in for good measure. As I said, check in was easy and friendly. The initial booking is $60S which is around $65 AUD, but I feel like we paid a bit more. $25S for additional hours.

The room was again, brown and not very inspiring I guess, except that you look through the window to see planes taking off and landing which is certainly pretty cool. It was spacious and comfortable nonetheless and I would have to class it as a very good 3-star room, or a slightly drab 4-star room. WiFi of course, but who cares? I needed sleep, and sleep I got. Five hours out of the six or so we stayed there for.

After that, it was a lovely hot shower, which really did hit the spot. Again, the bathroom was spacious. I had one fear now, and that was that the sleep would mean I wouldn’t sleep a minute on the final flight home to Melbourne. But somehow I did. I guess five hours still wasn’t enough to make up for the one hour sleep I’d had the previous 20 hours or so. Perhaps I was more relaxed too? It’s hard to say. But I slept a few hours back to Melbourne, and all in all despite arriving in the morning, I didn’t need an afternoon nap on my first day home to get through the day.

Which is why I would rate this as a big success. And it’s certainly better than spending 8 hours in an airport looking for a couple of seats together to try for a nap! And it really didn’t cost that much either. It can get booked up, I’ve tried to get in before but it was fully booked, so if this sounds like the way you’d like to break up your trip and rejuvenate, perhaps booking online through their website like I did is the way to go!

Andy’s Ratings:

Value For Money: 3.5/5

Cleanliness: 4/5

Noise: 3.5/5

Service: 4/5

Location: 4.5/5

TOTAL: 19.5/20 [78/100]

Thanks for Reading – May the Journey Never End!