Trip Report: Qantas 787 Dallas to Sydney in Business Class (DFW-SYD)

I wrote this on the 17 hour, no-wifi flight and boy with what's going on in Los Angeles and Tehran this sure as hell reads like fiddling while Rome burns. Got a coffee in Sydney and the barista hears my accent and says 'my god, are you guys ok?' No, we're not…

This was my first-ever trip on Qantas (!!) and, in short, it felt like United Polaris on a good day – pleasant staff, comfortable bed, decent food. 85,000 Alaska miles (topped up with my BILT card). It's a well-timed flight: take off around 10pm, eat dinner, go to bed, wake up, have breakfast, land at 6am in Sydney. I didn't even have time to watch a movie, just a couple games of Balatro ;)

*gay gasp*

👎 As already mentioned, no wifi. I’ll forgive LATAM for not having it, but for a carrier with this pricing and reputation it’s unacceptable. Full stop. That said, it’s an overnight flight completely designed around maximizing your sleep so it just wasn’t that big a deal in practice.

There's a staff person behind that monitor, I swear

👍 Very nice that Qantas sprung for American Airlines Flagship Lounge access (versus the normal American lounge), even better that they had a staffed Qantas customer service counter inside that lounge.

👍 The seat is nice, good for tall people. Rows alternate between aisle-adjacent and window-adjacent. The window-adjacent ones have more privacy.

👍 Love the eco friendly mattress pad with a pocket to properly anchor it to your seat headrest. (United, are you listening?)

And I saw my reflection...

🤩 The hidden coke mirror was a nice touch.

Big selection of Asian movies

👍 IFE selections seemed pretty sparse to me, but maybe the Australia-centric TV shows menu would be more appealing to Australians than it was to me. The movie section was a lot better: lots of Asian, Indian, and European titles in addition to the Hollywood and Australian ones

🤷 While the staff are very friendly, they definitely have American levels of proactiveness: no refills on water or wine, no dirty dish pickup beyond the first pass. Yes, you can call and they’ll happily take care of it, but ten people walked past my dirty dishes and empty wine glass and didn’t do anything. A wealthy Asian country's flag carrier this ain't.

my BECSPK had local salt and pepper packets from a famous Aussie spice shop

👍 Decent french press coffee with steamed milk. Given how vocally opinionated Australians are about their coffee, this was 5/10. If United had served me this it’d be 7/10.

🤷 My Bacon Egg and Cheese Salt Pepper Ketchup for breakfast was decent, but like the Delta shake shack bun on the way here, it had gotten slowly burnt from the bottom while being reheated so it was tough and chewy, not charred.