Flight travel time from the US west coast to East Africa usually takes about a day. Given there are no nonstop flights, travelers must layover in Europe, Türkiye, or the Middle East. Out of all carriers Qatar Air offers the shortest travel time, clocking in at 23 hours. Imagine being seated in economy for that long. It’s doable, but not the most pleasant. With mother-in-law in tow, we decided to splurge and booked all of us onto Qatar’s famous Q Suites to make the trip more palatable.
Our one-hour transfer in Doha was cut down to 40 minutes, thanks to our late arrival. We made it onto our connecting flight, but our bags didn’t. Luckily, I had tossed in a couple of AirTags into our luggage allowing us to track them throughout (they had actually just arrived in Dar es Salaam this morning).
We finally made it to the hotel at 12:30am, but never felt more refreshed after a day’s worth of flying. And now that we’ve flown with the best, it’s all downhill from here.
FIRE'd @ 47 
Isn’t it funny – and endlessly interesting – how people’s travel priorities are different. We would simply never pay the extra to go first class (or upgraded whatever name) in any circumstances. Whilst it’s obviously better quality, we haven’t ever seen a difference in price which makes it worth doing – neither of us can see why it would ever be worth paying all that extra when we can spend that money on other elements of travel. Good job we’re all different, life would be boring if we all liked the same things!
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Very true. For me, it boils down to tolerance and value. Unfortunately for our pocketbook, long haul flights are my Achilles heel. I am usually at my wit’s end by hour 8, and the level of discomfort rises exponentially from there on out (I realize staring at the flight map instead of watching movies doesn’t help matters). By hour 10, the need for comfort trumps any sensibilities. This is our very first business class flight, and with some advanced planning with credit card reward points, we should be able to travel comfortably in the future without too much damage 🤞
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I guess we’re lucky in one respect in that we both find it easy to sleep on aeroplanes – in fact I nearly always fall asleep before take off! As well as that, Michaela will watch films she downloaded beforehand (so her own choices) whereas I’m very content to put the headphones on and listen to music, even for hours. So in essence we could never see the value in the difference between “cattle class” and the posh seats!!
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You guys are indeed blessed in that way.
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