So, we used Air Asia to book some domestic flights within Thailand. It was the first time I have ever used them and honestly, it will be the last.

Here are some of the high-points, or low-points, depending on how you look at it:

A. They do not allow any changes of any kind to your tickets when within 48 hours of your flights. You can’t and they won’t help you in any way.

B. Customer service, either via phone or their hardly ever working chat function is as inept and as worthless as you could imagine. As well, the web and travelers you meet recount stories of waiting hours – if not days in some cases. We wasted over 1 hour of valuable time in cue to chat only to be told they could not help us. The last line of my chat to my chat rep was, “I hate you”.

C. They charge for each and every bit of luggage based on weight. For example, 0-15kg is x price, 15-30kg is xx price, etc. No first bag, just straight charged for all luggage. Period. Nickel and dime stuff.

D. IF you make a change outside of that 48 hour window, you can only change your times and dates.. no destination changes. So, if you were to fly to destination A and want to switch to B and just pay the differences, forget it.

E. IF you make a change outside of that 48 hour window, they will try to charge you AGAIN for their baggage fees. We changed a flight and prepaid for the baggage fees and when we changed the flight, they tried to charge us again despite the fact we should have those unused flights baggage fees just credited to this new flight since we already paid them. It took 45 minutes, a move back and fourth between 2 counters, 3 people and 1 call to a “manager” to hash it out… all for about $14 worth of fees, but at that stage, it was all about the principal of the matter.

F. Post sales flight changes and edits via their web site require a web degree. It is a pretty convoluted system at best that often was offline or did not function correctly.

G. Shocking near American level apathetic sales people at their outlet locations. We stopped into an actual office location in Chiang Mai and the girls could not have made us feel any more like were intruding on their personal time than they did. It was a rare bit of rudeness in Thailand I must admit and you got the distinct feeling you were being screwed with and not being told the whole story.

In the end, we just ate one of our Air Asia flights and bought a new flight with Thai Air… where we had none of these issues.