Okay, a lot’s been said about planes offering wi-fi as part of their on-board service. Many people abhor the idea, preferring to spend all those hours travelling through the sky entirely away from any kind of earthly contact. 

And I most certainly get that, especially if you are going on a serious holiday and want to escape entirely anything to do with bill reminders and work-related correspondence.

Others, on the other hand, are more than happy to spend a couple of those in-flight hours paying bills, sending emails, clearing a bulging inbox, downloading their fave shows, cleaning up their social media platforms, keeping abreast of news and generally sorting out online ‘stuff’. You know the drill…

And, yes, I am definitely one of the latter.

So when I stepped on to a plane the other day – Virgin VA1 from Sydney to Los Angeles for a business trip – I got a very nice surprise when one of the cabin crew said over the audio that wi-fi was available on this flight.

As it was 9.30 on a Monday morning and the beginning of the working week – for any worker, Monday is always a day fraught with a zillion emails, many of them unnecessary, plenty of them not – it meant lots of questions needing answers for the week ahead and others that just required very quick deletion.

Connecting was a breeze. Into settings, then to wi-fi, and bang, through to the payment portal. I opted for the $20 approach – which would last the entire 13-hour flight (if I wanted to spend all that time online, of course) – or there was an $8.90 option for one hour of wi-fi. I did my maths – pretty much a no-brainer – and away I went. Connected! (The wi-fi service is available for every Virgin flight class, by the way, so it’s egalitarian approach able to placate every kind of traveller.)

Thus, I spent a few hours of my Monday morning online, cruising at around 30,000 feet, taking care of the online business I had to. Then I happily put away my device before getting into the serious business of eating, watching a movie and trying to sleep in order to acclimatise my body to the new time zone coming up in about eight hours.

What I loved about having used wi-fi in the air was, upon landing in LA, there wasn’t a barrage of pings, emails and notifications that needed responding to. It actually made me feel a lot fresher and clear-headed, and ready to greet the reason for my business trip.

The other advantage? I didn’t have to get into a cab at turn on global roaming (concurrently racking up the dollars!) and spend an hour doing what I quite comfortably and happily had already done while high above the Pacific. Effectively, I’d already had a wi-fi working day like I would have had I actually been on terra firma.

I think flying with wi-fi is a godsend – particularly if travelling for a business trip and you really can’t afford to lose an entire day’s worth of connectivity. And before you wonder whether this online access meant a whole plane full of people blabbering on their phones or video-calling via FaceTime and Skype, nope, there was not one bit of that going on.

Inflight wi-fi is available on several other international carriers, but both Virgin and Qantas are getting into the swing very quickly. So in my humble opinion, and as a pretty frequent traveller for work, the whole idea totally rocked. I’m sold on being a high-flyer with great connections!