An update on my Batik Air experience; hope this of use for anyone looking to use them. We flew two domestic Indonesia segments on ID, one in economy (CGK-LBJ) and one in business (LBJ-DPS). Both were booked using trip.com since the Batik website would not accept my US credit card.

- Seat assignments. I could not figure out how to assign seats in advance. Apparently it is only an option at check-in, which opens 12 hrs prior to departure. This was true for the Business ticket as well as coach. For the coach segment, there was no option to pay for better seats or upgrade to business at check-in. For the coach segment, despite selecting seats 9EF in the app, when I received the boarding pass email, we had seats 10A and 9E. The agent at bag drop was able to change it to 10AB.

- Check-in. As far as I can tell, you must check-in in advance using the BookCabin app. The only counters at CGK and LBJ were bag-drop, and you show your QR code they email you and then they proceed to check your bags.

- Bag drop. At CGK there were many bag drop counters and you had to find the right one for your flight. The bag drop number listed on the monitors for our flight were incorrect and we had stand in line twice. There are individual queues for each bag drop and if you get unlucky yours may not move while the others do. Why they don't have a single queue and have the head of the queue go to the next available counter (like everywhere else in the world) is beyond me.

- Gates. At CGK we waited at gate D3 as that's where the monitor said our flight was departing from, despite the boarding pass saying gate D5. And at gate D3 there was a monitor with the flights supposedly leaving from that gate listed. Ours was listed. Around boarding time I asked the agent at D3 when boarding would start and he said our flight was at D5, which ended up being true. Go figure.

- Flight change. At LBJ we arrived at the airport very early for our flight and there was an earlier flight to DPS so I asked at bag drop about changing to that flight. I was directed to outside and downstairs to find the ticketing office, which was poorly marked. Luckily there was no one there. The agent was helpful and was able to change our flight for a small fee, but it took a really long time. They also had inexplicably changed the departure of the earlier flight to 30 min earlier than listed. But we were able to get our bags checked and arrived at the gate a bit after boarding had started. This was mostly possible due to LBJ being a small airport.

- J class, A320. Nothing special. Bigger seat and tiny snack served. No alcohol on domestic flights in Indonesia.

- On the coach flight to LBJ the lavatory was absolutely disgusting with pee all over the floor and walls. Also, this flight was delayed an hour despite boarding being on time. We just sat on the ground waiting for them to transfer fuel to or from the plane next to us (we were at remote stand) and do whatever else - no explanation given, at least non in English.

In the end we got where we need to go without flight cancellations, so we're happy about that. But we had one domestic segment on Garuda in J and that was a far better experience than the Batik flights.