A yellow coffee truck appeared at Circular Quay last week, handing out free Singapore kopi, Vietnamese filter coffee and Thai milk tea. It was the Scoot Stopover Cafe — the budget airline's first brand activation in Australia, and the start of a four-stop pop-up series aimed at getting travellers talking about their next trip.

Behind the giveaways is a bigger story: Scoot has quietly become a serious player here. The Singapore Airlines subsidiary is now the ninth largest international airline operating in Australia by seat numbers, carrying roughly 3.5% of outbound Aussies. Australia is the airline's third biggest market, which Scoot's local general manager Adam Kelly puts down to the country's multicultural population and strong demand for visiting friends and relatives. The carrier flies twice daily from Sydney to Singapore, plus Melbourne and Perth services, connecting through Changi to more than 80 destinations across the Scoot and Singapore Airlines Group networks — including Guiyang in China's Guizhou province, where flights just launched. It has no immediate plans for Western Sydney airport, though it's keeping an eye on it.

So where are Aussies actually heading? Kelly points to Thailand — Bangkok and Koh Samui — and Vietnam, especially Da Nang. But his tip for the next big thing is Belitung, an island in Indonesia he describes as "the Bali of old": good value, proper beaches and decent hotels, without the crowds. It's an island off Sumatra famous for its granite-boulder-strewn shores, and it's the kind of destination that appeals before everyone else catches on.

Further afield, Kelly suggests a two-centre Japan trip: fly into Tokyo, do the city properly, then hop domestically to Okinawa for a beach-and-islands leg — Scoot's open-jaw option lets you fly back from a different city than you arrived in. And surprisingly for a low-cost carrier, Scoot's two European routes, Athens and Vienna, are proving popular with Australians; it's one of the only LCCs selling Australia-to-Europe fares, usually via a Changi stopover.

The practical upshot for travellers: if you're flexible and happy to transit Singapore, Scoot's network covers a lot of ground at low fares, from Southeast Asian beach towns to Europe. And if Bali's prices and queues are wearing thin, Belitung is the sort of under-the-radar alternative worth booking before it becomes a thing.