I lived in Yogyakarta for 15 years with my family. We've flown Garuda many, many times, both domestically and internationally. It wasn't bad at all, and I understand they've improved significantly over the last couple of years. They were very useful for redemption from Indonesia since they often had award availability and you could connect to NW and their other partners at many points outside of Indonesia (SIN, BKK, KUL, HKG, NRT, etc.). The other cool thing was that I could redeem miles from LAX to CGK or DPS on another airline, and then add on the flight to JOG for no extra miles (I never paid more than 60,000 miles, and I redeemed 15-20 award tickets of this type). Usually this resulted in Garuda waiving the usual domestic overweight charges since the flight was considered to be a continuation of the international itinerary and our bags were tagged all the way from LAX to JOG.

This will be a good thing for people traveling on ST carriers to Indonesia. Yes, safety is an issue when traveling to Indonesia, but flying is still a whole lot safer than other modes of travel (particularly in Indonesia). The problem isn't really so much with Garuda (which, together with the new Mandala is the best of the bunch in Indonesia), but with the entire transportation infrastructure in that country.