Air Asia’s Money Generating Scheme

by admin on February 21, 2009

air-asia-money-factoryDon’t get me wrong, Air Asia offer a great selection of flights at brilliant prices throughout er, well Asia basically, but they do have a particular Gotcha!  They only allow 15kg of hold luggage,  anything above that and you could be paying a lot in excess baggage.  At Phnom Penh airport my backpack weighed in at 19.75kg and I was charged $5 for each kilo  over the 15.  Just to avoid complicated maths the Air Asia staff  helpfully rounded it up to $20 – and then refused to accept my $20 bill in payment because they said it was too creased………

OK – it does say in the Air Asia small print, the very small print, on the website that the allowance is 15kg but who reads the small print?  To be fair to AA though, a couple of years ago in Kuala Lumpur I was 1kg over and the desk guy said he’d let it go this time.

You win some, you lose some.

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

adiosotom February 22, 2009 at 11:19 pm

Oh no! I had a similar problem with AirAsia leaving Hanoi about a year ago… I’d gone a little overboard having new clothes tailored in Hoi An and was so overloaded I risked paying more for excess luggage than I’d paid for the clothes 🙂

Somehow I managed to get my checked luggage down to about 17kg, which they didn’t charge me for, and surreptitiously got the rest through as carry on.

Tom
http://adioso.com

paulyrob February 23, 2009 at 6:58 am

Judging by the amount of stuff I saw Westerners buying in Hoi An when I was there, I reckon you got off lightly!

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