This is a route my wife and I have travelled once every year or two for some time. The last few times we've done it, I've made use of my stash of avios, companion vouchers, GUFs and space releases to travel in in F.

However on our return from SYD this March, our flight was delayed 28 hours due to crew sickness, so we opted for the offered alternative of SYD-DOH on QR in F, and DOH-LHR on BA in J (Club Suites) and that journey was a revelation. It had been a while since I had travelled in F on QR, and the seats are really showing their age. The service on the flight was very haphazard, and the crew seemed quite stressed, something I've never encountered in QR J. OK, so we had caviar, and a better class of claret, but overall I felt BA F was a better experience, even though I'm not wholly enamoured of the BA F seat, and I greatly lament the passing of buddy-dining. The real surprise however was flying club suites from Doha to London. It was our first time in club suites, and we both really liked the seat, to the extent that next January's trip to Oz will be in Club Suites, at a considerable saving in avios and cash! And - given that the vino won't be as good, it'll probably be good for my liver too!

To the point at hand: we always used to stop over in Singapore for a couple of days on the way out, and then fly back from Sydney without a stopover. If you fly from London on the earlier flight to Singapore, you'll arrive in the late afternoon, and it's easy enough to keep going until 11:00pm or so, after which you should be able to sleep through until 7:00 or 8:00am. After 2 days in Singapore, you'll almost be on top of the 8 hour time difference and as Sydney is only 3 more hours ahead, it should then be a lot easier to keep going all day, despite the crack of dawn arrival.

This year, however, we flew out without a stopover. Arriving in Sydney at the unearthly time of 05:30 makes it very hard work to plough through until bed-time, and my practice now in such scenarios is to take a time-limited nap in the early afternoon. I find that two hours is enough to refresh me for the remaining 6 or 7 hours until proper bed-time, without preventing me from having a good 6-8 hours sleep overnight. However, I know that anything too much longer than a couple of hours will properly mess up my body clock, and make it much harder to get on top of the jet-lag, so I always set two alarms for 10 minutes apart, to ensure I don't overdo it! A good alternative, as mentioned up-thread, depending on the weather, is to spend as much time as you can outdoors in the fresh air. Direct exposure to sunlight helps with jet-lag, and a good breeze will blow most of the cobwebs away.