Singapore Airlines and Jetstar flight search and booking

Having gone through the process of these two recently I thought I’d mention the likes and dislikes I had for each. Actually it will be pretty much just what I hated about both. I’ll start with Jetstar which has just a couple of things but both are to do with the all mighty dollar which automatically makes them high priority issues. First is to do with the earning of QANTAS frequent flyer points, it is very confusing to work out which flights actually earn these points, and then it says if you pay an extra amount on an airfare you can earn points, but if you read the conditions it says you can earn points on flights with flight numbers starting with JQ (and something else), but then why do you have to pay extra to earn these points, I couldn’t work it out, so I just paid the extra fee to make sure that the points were earned (they were a requirement for the person I was buying the airfares for). Stupid confusing pricing schemes, that’s why I’m giving up on QANTAS frequent flyers, I’ll use up my points when I get enough and then not bother trying to earn them any more. The second and more annoying issue was the booking fee, it’s not stated anywhere that there is a booking fee, and then at checkout time a magical little field pops up with a $30 booking fee (this was for a domestic flight, so it’s more for international), what this fee is for I have no idea, but it’s super annoying and just a plain rip off. I’ll avoid anything Jetstar or QANTAS from now on if I can.

Singapore A380

Now the world’s “best” airline (?), my girlfriend swears by them, I haven’t flown with them since 2006 (they were quite good from what I remember) mainly because they’re not a part of the QANTAS alliance, but that’s all going out the window now, I don’t give a shit about QANTAS. I’m excited for this trip we’re going on because I will get to go on an A380 (pictured) for the first time (despite all the issues), and also because if it sucks it’s my girlfriend’s fault :D. Their web site is very flash heavy which already makes it quite bad, so there’s a lot of loading and slow functionality on a normal computer (macbook 2008 core 2 duo 4GB ram), I wasn’t that impressed just selecting the origin, destination, and dates, but moved on. The way the price page is set up is quite good, they’re all a bit like that now, although my favourite is the one with the grid showing the different start and end dates with the prices. The thing I found annoying was that it was quite slow to choose seats and navigate between pages which eventually caused my session to time out, and I had to start over from the start (this was also affected by my indecision :D), but there is a warning about session time out at payment time, but not while you’re selecting the seats. So what happened next? I managed to get through everything in a timely fashion, but the seats that I selected in the timed out session were now occupied so I had to choose different ones. I had a feeling that they were only occupied because of my previous session so I checked it again the next day and as I guessed (at least for one of my selections), the seats I originally wanted were now free. OK, rant over, there was no booking fee, everything was straightforward with Singapore (apart from the bit of slowness) and no confusing wording, I’ll give my two cents worth on any future flight bookings, top deck of A380, I’m looking forward to that!

Picture stolen from the singapore airlines site.