Monday, October 10, 2016

My Scoot Experience - No Frills ; No Problem

Scoot, flyScoot
I am just back from my one-week short trip to Melbourne, Australia and this will be my first post after touching down. 

Usually, I will be taking full-fledged airlines like SQ, Emirates or Qantas for my regular trip to Melbourne. However, after receiving some good review from a couple of my friends, I decided to give it a try by taking the Scoot this time round. On one hand, I can save some money, on the other hand, I can have my maiden flight with the budget airline.  

My verdict? No frills , no problem! In fact, I am really happy with the experience and will definitely take Scoot again in the future. 

Prior to this, I always have negative connotation between budget airlines and the like of plane delay, re-scheduling without advance notices (to the passengers), lousy services and loss luggage etc... You can say that it's my luck, but I've never encountered any of such incident in both legs of my maiden flight. Smooth sailing...

Having said that, through my personal experience, there are a couple of action that the passengers of budget airlines can/should take in advanced in order to enjoy the flight even more (or minimize surprises):

1. Ensure you've purchased sufficient baggage allowance online - The basic FlyBag option provided 20 KG baggage (check-in) allowance, if you foresee that you need more than that, do purchase additional baggage allowance 48 hours prior to the flight time. Failing which, you will need to top-up more upon check in and the rate is much much higher than the online option. 
My experience : I need to top-up SGD100 for the extra 4 KG on my first leg to Melbourne, which is equivalent to SGD25 per KG. I can't blame them as the rate has been indicated clearly in the T&C. I did ask the ground staff on the rationale for such a big difference in the rates (for online, I just need to pay additional SGD12 for additional 5 KG) and she is not able to provide me with a convincing answer, anyone here know the rationale? 

2. Outside food is not allowed on the flight, so, if you think you need to eat/drink/munch during the flight, do purchase it in advanced (online) too to save cost. Of course, you can still purchase the same stuff during the flight but it will cost a little bit more.   

3. Since there is no in-flight entertainment, if you are not prepared to purchase their entertainment service, do bring along some books or pre-load your mobile devices with the ebooks, series or movies of your choice so that you can enjoy them there and then. 

Of course, I am not saying that every subsequent Scoot experience will be as smooth sailing as my maiden experience but I think Scoot has done a great job in upping the standard of budget airlines as a whole. 

Do you have any unique experience with budget airlines (not necessarily Scoot) or any budget airlines hack to share? Feel free to share them in the comment below.

Cheers!

4 comments:

  1. Act as deterrence against unforeseen baggage weights?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Noosa : probably yes, just find it that the 48 hours is a bit too long a gap, even if the passenger decide to add on extra baggage allowance on the last minute via online, it doesn't requires them to provide extra admin/service... :-)

      Delete
  2. Haha you are right! Well it is also great that scoot is flying to hokkaido now, freeing up time for exploring. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Noosa : Nice! Enjoy your upcoming Hokkaido exploration, I've been to Japan but not Hokkaido

      Delete

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