After a wonderful weeks of visiting Bali, Lombok and doing the boat trip from there to Komodo Island, we were heading back to Bali before our journey to Australia. As SkyTeam Elite Plus, Garuda was one of the airlines which we never flew and therefore we were quite excited about the flight.
The Airport
The airport in Labuan Bajo is surprisingly new but you can’t change people. They would not survive in Europe. Everything is so inefficient, slow, disorganised…
For SkyTeam Elite Plus there is bo lounge but you can have a coffee, pastry and ice cream on Garuda. But if flying in economy, try to explain that to the staff. Took me nearly 20 minutes until they could confirm it with Garuda, all that in new terminal with such a poor AC that you can’t breathe.
Boarding was a complete mess, so painfull, the gate agents did not know which row to board, non stop announcements…this was really bad.
But here we are stepping on board of our new airline in special livery!
The Flight
The plane was clean, well prepared. The crew offered sweets and earphones during boarding, the video was shown on the screens.
Once in the air, beside the announcement that we are flying Pikachu livery and we can see one on the engine on the left and one on the right (hey, Asians, why are you so interested in those noncultural things like Pikachu, Hello Kity etc.?), we have received this lovely bag containing water, sanitising towel, package of peas and beans (misleading signed as mixed nuts) and a warm chocolate bun. Wow, for this short domestic flight? Unbelievable!
On the way, we so Mount Rinjani on Lombok which we hiked a few days earlier…
And landed in DPS right on time!
For a minute I thought Garuda was offering products that Lufthansa offers too by the packaging style of the sanitizing wipe which is almost identical to the way Lufthansa would promote these things haha, but yeah, I'm quite surprised that Garuda is still offering a generous service like these on a domestic market that is very compettive and mostly being dominated by low cost.
Also nice to have a special livery aircraft, though I am curious as to why they decided to paint one of their aircraft in a pokemon livery as I would never connect them to either Garuda or Indonesia 😄
Thanks for the report though!