Air Asia Airfare Issues

I’ve been flying on Air Asia for what seems like a long time. I can remember when I first started using them. Their website was terrible. The biggest problem was that it was difficult to get the payment processed. I’d pick my flight and in the end it could take me as many as six or seven tries to get the payment fully processed. The website kept crapping out on me and I was never sure whether the payment got processed or not. I’d wait to see if I got a confirmation email. Sometimes I’d wait for a day or more. Sometimes I’d call the credit card to see if the payment got processed. This wasn’t just an isolated issue or a one time problem. Sometimes the website worked and sometimes it didn’t. That was the norm for a couple of years.

Today, the website is much, much improved but there are still issues. I found that I needed to make one-way bookings as I was never able to decline the baggage fee or travel insurance for the return flight on round-trip bookings. I could decline them on one-way flights. I needed to decline them because the fees tended to between 25% to 50% of the price of the flight. While I’m willing to pay for seat selection, I always carry on my luggage and I have my own travel insurance for the trip. I don’t need to pay the fees.

The biggest problem I had with the Air Asia website was that it didn’t handle their cookies well. Cookies are little pieces of real-time software that keep track of what’s going on between the user and the website. I found that I was usually able to get through one booking session fairly well, but doing multiple bookings back-to-back meant having to leave the browser or clearing the cache and the cookies after each booking due to 403 Errors. These errors are, typically, communication errors caused by poor programming of the information found in the cookies. When I encountered a 403 Error in my browser it meant my ability to book with Air Asia was over until the cookies timed out or I cleared the cache and cookies. This could be a pain on days when I wanted to make as many as four bookings.  Maybe I need to enroll in their Big Member program. While it’s a much better experience than it was when I originally started using their website, the Air Asia website can still cause me to become frustrated. I love all the cool things technology allows me to do, like booking airline tickets all over the world from the comforts of my home, and I hate how it doesn’t always work like I think it should. The key term here being “like I think it should.”

The issues that I have with the Air Asia website are really too bad because my overall experience with flying on the airline has been positive. I’ve seen posts on many forums that accuse Air Asia of being late all the time but my experiences with them have been relatively timely in terms of departures and arrivals. One thing I don’t like about the flights on Air Asia is that the arrivals can be be at second-tier airports that are located a very long way from the arrival city. This, however, is something that is quite common to budget airlines all over the world. That being said, I’ve found that there is virtually always a reasonably-priced shuttle bus available to take the passengers into town. It can, however, take as much as two hours to get into the destination city in some locations. Budget airlines have downsides associated with their use. I only use them because, relative to first tier airlines, they can be an incredible bargain.