To be frank, Mr Herbivore was a bit worried about flying on an airline with an alphanumeric airline code. There's something faintly solid and reliable about airline codes like BA, QF and SQ. He'd only ever previously seen alphanumeric codes on domestic Russian airlines flying old Soviet-era planes, so he was relieved to board a well-kept and shiny A330-300.
For Colombo we will fly with Air Asia X. It's different type of plane than the one we flew to Chiang Mai. Air Asia X has bigger planes and flies longer-distance routes like to Japan, Korea, Jeddah, Nepal and Australia.
You don't fly on the Air Asia family for service. It's a budget airline. You have to check yourself in online, and print your own boarding pass. You have to select how much baggage you want at the time you book your ticket.
If you don't do these things, you have to pay an extra fee. (We're not quite sure what the point of the check-yourself-in requirement is though: if you have checked bags, you still have to queue up for long periods to drop your bags, the staff still want to review your travel documentation, and on our return flight, they even gave us nice shiny new Air Asia boarding passes).
So Air Asia is a no-nonsense kind of airline. It doesn't offer movies or entertainment, and it doesn't offer food (although you can buy food on the plane). But it does leave on time. Passengers know that if they are not on board at the right time, they will miss their flight. Overall, this is a good thing. On D7 182, and our return flight D7 183, we left on time (although we were late arriving back in KL because of a strong headwind).
On the outbound leg, we had tried to eat breakfast and get coffee before we left KLIA2. This had been a shambles. We cleared Emigration before we ate, in order to avoid the queues, but while there are several landside cafes, the airside choice is quite limited.
We tried to eat at the airside food court, but despite being some of the very few passengers there, the service was extremely slow, to a point where we began to fear missing our flight. We gave up trying to order coffee, after 10 minutes standing in a queue of three.
We knew we couldn't take bottled water through security at KLIA2, but we were surprised that once we were through, we couldn't buy a bottle of water. The best you could do was buy a cup for MYR 2. As the cups appeared to have a capacity of more than 100mls, we weren't quite sure how aviation security was advanced by this.
Anyway, because we hadn't eaten properly, had missed coffee and failed to get water, we decided to buy something on the plane.
We invested in a bottle of water, a cup of tea and some cashew nuts. We would have had a Kit Kat, but they had apparently run out, so had a chocolate brownie instead. It was actually quite yummy.
Coming back, we ordered pot noodles. The vegetarian option wasn't especially tasty, and contained nasty monosodium glutamate.
Both ways, we would have ordered a more substantive meal - but vegetarian options are only available if you pre-order them online. You can't order them once you are on the plane.
This was a bit disappointing, and we think that Air Asia could better service its vegetarian customers by having standard vege meals on all its flights.
Our flight back was memorable for the world's worst-ever cup of tea. We think the flight attendant put a tea bag in a cup and then poured coffee into it. It was undrinkable. We would have complained and asked for another - except the cabin crew studiously ignored us for the rest of the flight.
But we still lucky to get the best view of sunset from our window.
Air Asia offers cheap flights (we pay 400$ for 2) - but provides no service. That's kind of okay, as you get what you pay for, and it's okay on short-haul flights. It wouldn't be much fun flying from KL to Melbourne though.
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