Our flight landed in Bandar Seri Begawan and we made our way to the departure area for our connecting flight to Dubai. We had read that the airport in Bandar Seri Begawan was small and undergoing renovations so we weren't expecting much. However, the departure area was smaller than we'd imagined and there was absolutely nothing to do there. There was one cafe upstairs, a small duty free section that would take less than a minute to walk through and a few souvenir stalls scattered around.

We found some seats and waited for our flight to be called up to go through the two security gates and into the boarding lounge. The flight back to Melbourne departing 5 minutes after our flight got called through but not the flight to Dubai. So, we waited and waited. It was now 30 minutes before scheduled departure and nothing. In the end we just decided to go through and saw that there were a number of people on our flight in the boarding lounge. The flight never was called through security.

The flight boarded and again was almost empty.The flight left on time and we were on our way to Dubai.