In Dubai, Peter Calder looks on enviously as the well-heeled browse among $12,000 bottles of wine.
Layovers are hell at the best of times. For my money, if you are travelling to the other side of the world, it makes more sense to break the trip for a decent period of time. A shower, a decent kip between sheets and a lunch served when your body clock says it's lunchtime, can make a lot of difference to the shape you're in when you get to where you're going.
But when time is short and you have to make the trip in two big gulps, a bit of comfort in transit goes a long way.
This traveller gave up going via the US years ago, when the transit process at LAX became a gruelling enter-rush-exit palaver in which everyone is treated as a potential criminal.
I prefer to travel via Hong Kong, but on a recent trip to Ireland, I flew with Emirates, which last year opened a Dubai-Dublin route. I had no time for a stopover, but there is plenty to keep the transiting passenger entertained, fed and watered without having to set foot into the 40C desert heat outside.
The Auckland-Sydney and Sydney-Dubai legs of the flight were on board the fabled Airbus A380. In August 2008, Emirates was the second airline to take delivery of the behemoth, which remains the world's biggest passenger airliner.
The opening, in 2013, of Concourse A at Dubai International Airport, provided a home base fit for such an aircraft. The world's first, and so far only, facility purpose-built to accommodate the A380, it shows off the state of the art in transit.
Like all aspects of travel, Concourse A looks better from the expensive seats. The 645m-long silver and blue building, which looks like a massive, but much sleeker, version of the Cloud on the Auckland waterfront, devotes more than 28,000sq m of its floor space to first- and business-class lounges.
Lounge manager Karen Hartley explains that these lounges run the length of the building and connect directly to the boarding gates. So premium passengers can go directly from the lounge without having to rub shoulders with us lesser mortals. The first-class folks have it all laid on, too: an a la carte restaurant and their own dedicated duty-free shop, where I saw an awful lot of Dom Perignon. (I suppose it wouldn't do for them to be rummaging through the gin specials, but if you're mega-rich, do you really much care about duty-free savings?)
Dubai International Airport lays it on for the first-class folk at Concourse A. Photo / Supplied
Well, they do, says Ben Odgers, who runs, among many other things, the fine wine and whisky shop Le Clos, which caters not just to the first-class passengers, but to anyone with a sufficiently large credit card limit. The shop deals in "the best of the best" says Odgers, pointing to $12,000 bottles of wine and an 1858 cognac for more than $250,000. And the restrictive alcohol laws in the United Arab Emirates have prompted Le Clos to offer a storage facility for big buyers so they can pick up stockpiled purchases a bottle or two at a time as they pass through.
For the rest of us, the food outlets at Concourse 9 are likely to banish memories of tired pre-packaged sandwiches and burgers from multinational chains. It has the only location outside the UK of the popular Giraffe restaurant chain, and Jack's Bar & Grill, a southern-style restaurant inspired by the Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey, offers such Southern classics as crab cakes, gumbo, jambalaya and meatloaf rolls as well as burgers and steaks for big appetites.
Kevan Hodges, the general manager of the bars and restaurants at the hub, says it's the only place in the world where the distillery's prestige Sinatra Select is sold by the glass.
Frank Sinatra was fond of sipping Jack Daniel's on stage, he says, and his frequent favourable mentions of the label prompted the tribute brand. A glass will set you back more than $40. It is not clear whether it will improve your singing.
CHECKLIST
Getting there:Emirates flies daily to Dubai from Auckland. Return economy fares start from $2099, including taxes.
