Originally Posted by
emcampbe
Hoping one can help me with experience on AirAsia. Personally, I try to avoid the ULCCs - I have tended to see the upfront prices + add-ons like baggage, seats, etc.. usually be not much less than full service carriers, when all is said and done. But trying to get from CNX-HHQ (Hua Hin), and somehow, AirAsia flies this - as far as I can tell the only flight into HHQ at all, and considering it because it avoids flying to BKK, then having to do a ~3 hours from there. Flight isn't even that cheap - at least on the day we need to go - roughly about the same as TG into BKK. But convenience a big factor here...especially since we're traveling with our 8 and 5 yo daughters, so avoiding a 3 hour drive to HHQ (plus to a lesser extent, the additional cost of transportation to Hua Hin), tips the scales to the flight that will get us right there.
So the questions I have:
- my understanding is our bag allowance should be combined - so if we buy 20kg of luggage each (or more likely the 'value pack' or whatever that is), we should have 80 kg total, regardless of how this is divided (assuming it doesn't go over AirAsia max. bag specs). For example, if we have 4 bags, 2 that are 23kg, the other 2 are 16kg, we should not need to pay for extra. Is this correct?
- Is the standard carry-on allowance (7kg) enforced by weight - and can there be more than one bag that add up to the limit, or is that limited to a single bag (either roller board or backpack). Seeing some threads on places like Reddit that seem to suggest they do tend to check pretty aggressively at KUL, but mostly not at other stations, but don't know if that is dated. Also have heard that a laptop bag can be brought on in addition to the stated allowance. Assuming we're not bringing large bags - we might have a standard carry on size bag, and then backpack and laptop, is luggage likely to be weighed at a station like CNX? Understand that if it is weighed, they are probably pretty strict on charging for any little thing above 7kg exactly. Any idea how much more this is to book at the airport vs. at time of buying the ticket (for the record, the charge for an extra 7kg carry on at booking seems to be ~$13 USD
- Any idea, should we need to add extra checked luggage, if there is a price difference to do in advance, but after ticketing, vs. at time of purchasing ticket. Also, how much more to do at the airport vs. at least 4 hours in advance?
- In looking at seats, I assume the price difference for 'hot seats' vs. the rows just behind that vs. the rows at the back of the flight are just based on how close/far they are from the front of the plane, correct? Or are there seat pitch differences, for example, rows 1 - X have extra legroom compared to those in the very back.
- Any other 'gotcha's' I should look out for?
Appreciate any advice.
My experience recently regarding the baggage prices - I was a bit paranoid after reading FT folks paying $100 per bag at the gate, so paid for 1 20kg of luggage across our 2-person booking. I knew I could get 1 of the rolling luggage to be pretty close to 7kg. Most LCC don't bother weighing the smaller bag in my experience, unless it looks really heavy (e.g. avoid wearing belt straps because that just indicates you have something pretty heavy in there), but you will usually get bit on your rolling luggage. For the price, we paid 406kIDR (~27USD) on the app after check-in which seemed to be consistently that price even if it was 1 week vs. 5 hours before the flight. I'm guessing it's a lot cheaper at booking, but we never buy that early. I'm not sure what would happen if you bought <4 hours before departure. If you already know you're overweight, probably best to just buy in advance for that piece of mind, and plus the staff will be nicer at check-in because they saw you already did your homework and paid ahead. For us, they ended up only weighing the 1 bag that we paid to check in. After that, the combined 14kg seems reasonable for the amount of stuff we were carrying (or maybe the staff didn't care since we already paid for 1 bag at that point).
For seats on your specific flight, it's probably not worth buying the seat because it's such a short flight. The auto-assigned seating seemed to start at Row 18 since that's what we ended up with when checking in right when check-in opened, and seeing the pattern up until a few hours before the flight. These LCCs do tend to assign 2pax groups to window+middle, and I personally prefer aisle seat so I usually end up purchasing seat assignments.
Rows 2-5 are considered hot seats on your standard A330 since they're front row, but the pitch is the exact same. We bought them for our recent flight since it was almost 3 hours and we have a higher chance to get a row to ourselves (2 people spread across 3 seats) Row 1 is obviously more legroom since it's bulkhead, but I personally prefer having the option to store in-front of the seats.