You don't know this yet but your summer holiday plans are about to change. Instead of the week on Salina, the three weeks in Maine, the trip to inspect the cabin you're building in Chile or the 10 days on Mykonos you're now going to be boarding a flight to Tokyo Narita, jumping in a cab to Haneda and sampling domestic air travel as it should be. I know this sounds like an enormous sacrifice but if you care about the way you get from A to B, have some funds to invest or simply enjoy new experiences then do as I did earlier in the week and sample a new benchmark in civil aviation.

My trips to Tokyo are normally crammed with mad taxi scrambles to track down obscure bars and cafés, the odd meeting, perhaps an interview and too-late nights belting out the clutch of songs I've mastered since I joined the karaoke circuit. In London, Zürich and New York I'm a creature of habit, but in Tokyo I'm generally up for anything. So when my colleague Noriko interrupted a shopping incursion at Tomorrowland in Shibuya and suggested I get myself into a taxi because we were flying down to southern Japan for the evening I made my way out of the store, on to Meiji-dori and bundled myself into the back of a Toyota Crown Super Deluxe cab. Having just stepped off the SAS flight from Copenhagen I wasn't that keen on spending another 90 minutes in the air. But when Noriko explained that she'd got us some tickets on Starflyer, it was all change.