GA now offers online booking for all destinations

[SQflyergirl]

Dear SQflyergirl,

Garuda Indonesia offers Online Booking for all international and domestic destinations.
The new user friendly online booking interface has been tried and tested by over 100 airlines worldwide. You can make an online booking with any Visa or MasterCard.

[Ratman]

This is a great news. It's about time too they have an online booking system. A few years back, I still had to go to a travel agent to book for GA flights.

[SliverKris]

BUT...

i. There are separate booking menu for Domestic and International flights despite both menus featuring all domestic and international destinations. The booking engine is set at the Domestic menu by default.

ii. The date of the return journey is not auto set to the logical eventual date. Example, if one plan to travel on 1 October 2010, the return journey's date is still set at 1 August 2010. One has to manually click on the date and the month.

iii. The Class of Service (whether Economy or Business) is not auto set at Economy. The drop down menu also listed 'Executive' (Business) on top of 'Economy' instead of the other way around. Not many travelers know what 'Executive' means in GA lingo.

iv. The segregation of domestic and international flights in the booking engine causes a little confusion to travelers whose journey involved both domestic and international sectors. The booking engine can do this kind of booking actually (e.g. KUL-[CGK]-PNK vv) through the 'International' menu.

v. Once flights have been selected (at step 3 'Review'), there is no 'Back' function. One has to 'Start Over'. The back function at step 3 'Review' is crucial because in step 2 'Flights' the price of the ticket is not being shown. Most travelers would prefer to look at the option of the price available for each pairing of inbound and outbound flights.

vi. Aircraft type is not being stated anywhere in step 1, 2 or 3. 'Smart' travelers prefer to know on what type of aircraft they are flying (whether the brand new B738 or the rickety old B735).

vii. At the booking page (step 1, 2 or 3) the GA logo on top left of the webpage does not lead one to 'Home'. One has to click on 'Start Over' to go to 'Home'.

viii. The only good thing about the booking engine is it listed all GA code share flights. KUL-CGK vv for example offers 12 daily flights (2 GA and 10 MH). And the code share flights are also through all possible code share routings such as KUL-[MES]-CGK, KUL-[DPS]-CGK etc. But this many options lead to the problem as mentioned in point (v).

Although better than nothing, still it is an unimpressive effort.