A broken aircon, a six-hour delay: my $900 domestic Australian flight from hell

The war in the Middle East has a lot to answer for, including soaring airfares. But when a three-hour domestic economy flight costs $900 one way, it's time to ask when dynamic pricing becomes simply price gouging?

CHECKING IN: I'm flying into Perth from Johannesburg, South Africa, and have three hours before my next flight home to Melbourne; it's the right amount of time to grab my bags, check into the domestic flight and get an hour's work done in the cafe. Well, that's the plan.

THE FLIGHT: My Jo'berg flight is cancelled due to technical difficulties with the aircraft, and the airline automatically rebooks me onto the same flight, 24 hours later. Uncharacteristically, my international leg and domestic leg are booked on two separate tickets, which means I have to negotiate the change for my domestic flight with Virgin Australia, from Perth to Melbourne. The timing is unfortunate - two days after the US starts bombing Iran, the aviation world is in a tailspin.

Naturally, there's a flight-change fee, and then also a fare difference, which must be paid within 10 minutes of a text message being sent from Virgin's call centre. I'm sucking it up, with a claim to my travel insurer in the offing. We take our seats in the hot plane and start to taxi off when the pilot announces the aircon's not working (we've all noticed). We wait on the tarmac for about 30 minutes before we're offloaded back into the terminal, so the engineers can get to work. The flight eventually departs six hours later, at 10.25pm, coasting across time zones to arrive in Melbourne at 4.25am.

THE CLASS: Economy. I pay a $99 flight-change fee and then another $462 for the fare difference. Add the amount I originally paid and, in total, it's cost about $900 to get from Perth to Melbourne, and I'm still down the back near the toilets in economy, because I cannot - will not - pay yet more for a seat allocation. In another piece of fine-print maliciousness, my ticket class won't allow me to pay for an upgrade using Velocity points.

FOOD AND DRINK: It's a full six hours' delay by the time we push off, and although it's not required by law, Virgin Australia has given out vouchers of $24 a person to buy dinner. By this time, most of the food outlets in the terminal have shut, so we're all full of deep-fried chicken, sloppy burgers and chocolate bars. I see little uptake from the inflight snacks trolley; we all just want to sleep.

ENTERTAINMENT: Even though flight times are three hours plus, there are no seatback screens on these 737s. Sleep eludes me, so I log onto the infight Wi-Fi to further erode my brain by binge-watching a US period drama.