2 lessons that I learnt during our last long haul trip

2 lessons that I learnt on our last long haul trip

This summer, my wife and I went to Mauritius (trip report coming soon). During that trip, I came to realise a couple of things that I hadn't really thought about before. The first one has to do with comfort, and the second thing has to do with photography.

Lesson #1 - Aisle seats are gold
I've never really understood people who prefer aisle seats. I mean, if you can secure a window seat, why wouldn't you want to do it? And although I probably maintain the idea that window seats are the best for short haul flights, I'm beginning to change my mind about medium- to long haul flights. At least if you're travelling in economy class. On our last long haul (or rather medium haul) trip, we had four flights at roughly six hours each. Two of them were night time flights. On all four flights, we had window and middle seats. Since we flew economy class on all flights, and all the aircraft had 3-4-3 configuration, we always had someone sitting next to us, in the aisle seat. 

While asking that person to move out into the aisle so I could go to the lavatory once or twice wasn't that big of a deal, I would have loved to be able to walk around and stretch my legs a lot more than I did. And especially during the night time flights. I was awake for most of those flights, while the person in the aisle seat was fast asleep. Waking someone up just to be able to walk up and down the aisle didn't really seem like a nice thing to do. Next time I'm on long haul flights in economy class, I'll seriously consider trying to get an aisle seat. Sure, it's great to be able to look out the window, but being able to move about the cabin and use the lavatories whenever I want to is worth a lot more in my (new) opinion.


Lesson #2 - Daytime flights are gold
Before I wrote trip reports, I didn't really care what time of day or night the planes departed. I mean sure, if it was possible to take a trip with ruining a good night's sleep that's obviously preferable, but I didn't mind night time flights per se. Now that I take pictures, I've come to realise what a huge difference it makes to fly when the sun's up. Not only can I capture what I want, but I also have bigger creative freedom when it comes to shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings. In the middle of the night, I don't really have much choice, and the pictures still turn out pretty bad.

If I'm trying a new airline or aircraft in the future, or if I'm flying on a really cool flight (such as the A380), I'll try to make them daytime flights. You'll see it soon enough, but on the daytime B777 flights between Stockholm and Dubai, I took tons of pictures, whereas the nighttime Dubai-Mauritius flights on the A380 where not as well documented. In this particular case, we couldn't really do anything about the itinerary, but I still learnt a valuable lesson.