Melbourne business and leisure trip 18-21 November

I was planning this trip while I was attending the expatriates compensation conference at Langkawi in October. The trip was intended for me to conduct a Contract Review Meeting with the relocation vendor of the company I work with. Out of a sudden, my boss who had accompanied me to Langkawi suggested to me to have a family holiday in Melbourne as well. However, since I had already planned a family holiday to Indonesia week of 24 November, I decided to only bring along my wife who was celebrating her birthday on Friday 21 November.

My Enrich points were enough for me to redeem return Business Class tickets for my wife. However getting the Business Class Enrich seats were a lot more difficult than I had imagined. I secured a seat for the flight from KLIA to Melbourne but I had to wait until the last day of the ticket purchase dateline to secure the return flight's seat. I realised that Malaysia Airlines were not providing me the seats until I booked a seat and told them that I would pay for it myself. When my wife and I took the flight from Melbourne to KLIA last Friday 21 November, the business class seats were not fully occupied.

I had a very long meeting on Wednesday 19 November going through the contract review assessing diligently the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the past one year. I had also lined up 3 meetings on Thursday 20 November meeting different stakeholders of the contract. At the same time KL was asking me to finalise the performance ranking of my team versus the whole operations team. As I had little time for the ranking session, I will be away on leave from 24 November; I only managed to squeeze an hour for a conference call to KL on Thursday 20 November. I expressed my reaction to the ranking done on Tuesday without my presence while I was on the plane. The ranking was ill planned; it had to be brought forward as the ranking facilitator had misread the ranking schedules. So little time with so many things to do.

My wife however enjoyed her visits as she was chaperoned for two days from Wednesday touring around Melbourne by a guide. She visited the Melbourne Central Business District, the famous Melbourne zoo and Queen Victoria Market.

We finally had our time together on Thursday evening at Phillip Island Penguin Parade. The trip from Melbourne CBD took us 90 minutes of driving. Both of us enjoyed the scenic journey of farm animals along the way. We saw cows, horses and sheep grazing on acres of farm fields.

Our planned to venture into Melbourne on Friday morning was cancelled, as I had to finalise my ranking notes to be sent to KL. We took the 3.40 pm flight and arrived in KL at 8.45 pm. We came back with a lot of memories, t-shirts, key chains, chocolates and several aboriginal trinkets. Oh by the way, the meals on the way back were really something that Malaysia Airlines need to improve; the fried rice was oily, the roast chicken and the chicken pie were salty. As always from my experience, the meals out of KL are a lot tastier.