Business Traveller (Asia-Pacific)
It’s a small world after all
The Golden Age of umpteen-stop plane journeys was thrilling and adventurous, but the convenience of today’s one-stop wonders is better
Just looking at the London–Capetown itinerary exhausts me... but it must have been thrilling
The topic of holidays and travel is often raised when meeting friends and neighbours (almost more than the weather!). We live in fortunate times. Direct routes are opening up new destinations, and if we pause for reflection, we should consider how lucky we are to spin the globe, decide to jump on a plane and 12 or 16 hours later,
voila, we’re on the other side of the world. I recently flew on what is currently the world’s longest commercially operated flight, from Auckland to Doha, a distance of 9,042 miles (14,552km) and a mere snip at 17hrs 40 mins from wheels up to wheels down. It passed surprisingly quickly.
A recent surprise gift left me thinking about just how lucky we are to have these easy journeys available at the click of a button or the swipe of a phone. The gift was a copy of the 1934 Bradshaw’s Air Guide, and it is an amazing reminder of just how far we have come in a relatively short time.
I researched three journeys that we now take very much for granted: London to Rome, Capetown and Singapore. From the UK today you can nip off to Rome for lunch and still be home in time to put the children to bed. In November 1934 the journey took three days, and routed you from London to Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Venice and finally into Rome. The single fare at the time clocked in at £18, 16s 2d, or the equivalent of £1,240 today (US$1,733).
Capetown was a ten-day journey, which included a plane to Paris, then a train to Brindisi, then by air to Athens, Alexandria, Cairo, Wadi Halfa, Khartoum, Juba, Entebbe, Nairobi, Dodoma, Mbeya, Broken Hill (Kabwe), Salisbury (Harare), Buluwayo, Johannesburg, Kimberley and finally Capetown. Just looking at this itinerary exhausts me. But it must have been thrilling, overnighting in hotels or camps before recommencing the journey the next day. The cost of a one-way journey to Capetown was £130, or £8,500 (US$11,880) in today’s money.
The hop, skip and jump to Singapore was equally amazing. It followed the same itinerary above as far as Cairo, then split and went via Gaza, Baghdad, Basra, Bahrain, Sharjah, Gwadar, Karachi, Jodhpur, Delhi, Cawpore, Calcutta, Akyab, Rangoon, Bangkok, Alor Star and, finally, Singapore.
On these journeys, passengers and luggage were weighed together (something Finnair has recently restarted, albeit on a volunteer basis for now). The notional weight per passenger was 100kg for traveller and baggage (75kg plus 25kg in theory). If customers were slightly more portly, they needed to travel with lighter luggage, as a surcharge of 1 per cent of the one-way fare was made per excess kilogram – an expensive addition for those carrying any extra weight.
Of course, the expense of these journeys was high. Passengers spent eight or ten days with the same crew, being wined and dined in the air and on ground. The additional costs of sourcing fuel, supplies and engineers along the route was invariably quite expensive, and the relatively few aircraft that could fly these routes hardly came at a bargain basement rate. The Jet Age emerged with the Comet, 707 and DC-8 followed by the DC-10 and 747, which opened up many destinations to mass tourism. But they were still stopping routes, where flights to/from Hong Kong touched down in the Gulf, flights from Thailand or Singapore to Europe routed via India, and longer runs included BA’s LondonAuckland service, which stopped in the Gulf, India, Southeast Asia and Perth, before finally landing in Auckland. Today’s travel seems to find a happy medium between small and large aircraft, with mid-size B787s and A350s opening up non-stop routes to smaller markets whilst still offering a variety of fares and cabins for customers on different budgets. So why not enjoy a long weekend in Vietnam? Or sample some superb wines in Santiago? Or hop down to Perth for some winter sunshine? It makes the world seem terribly small to me… but what a great thrill and privilege that we are able to explore it so easily.