If your travel-lust or business ever leads you into or out of Australasia, you should make sure your flight makes its obligatory stop at Singapore Changi Airport. If you have to be stuck at an airport, make sure you get stuck at this one.

Changi Airport is an incredibly well-equipped specimen of its kind. Let's begin with its architecture. The airport is large and gives a feeling of spaciousness, yet it is not confusing in its enormity. Ways to the airplanes are short and quickly found, so you can forget the feeling of being a lab rat in a maze experiment, a notion that has occurred to many travellers in airports around the world. Basically the airport is one symmetrical large football-ground-sized area with a few clustered shops on it or around its perimeter. All planes are along two wide arms that extend from the main area.

Changi Airport is completely laid out with carpet and fully air-conditioned. Everything is in working order, and sparklingly clean. You could practically eat from the floor, and the public restrooms really deserve their name, and they actually smell good. Want anything? They have it. Restaurants are plentiful and good and most popular cuisines are there. Aside from the basics, like the credit card phones that every airport has, Changi sports a whole array of new things including free local call modem plugs. There is an Internet Café, an interactive science exhibition, a cactus and orchid garden, fitness centre, shower and sauna and comfy, relaxing chairs for people who just really need a good snooze.

For the more active kind there is a free tour of Singapore available. But what is best is that Singapore recognises you as a long-term customer. This may sound trivial, but the practical side of this is that Singapore Airport tries to behave in a way that makes you want to come back. More precisely, the airport authority guarantees that nothing you buy inside the airport is more expensive than the middle price in the city itself. You cannot be cheated on your taxi ride into the city because there is a limousine service operating on a flat rate. And in order to attract shoppers, they don't even charge you an airport tax if your stay in Singapore is less than 48 hours.