From Senai Airport to Penang

Senai Airport was a small airport. However, it took us a while to locate the departure information and the various places to check-in our luggage and get the boarding passes.

There was the sales centre from AirAsia at the airport and several self check-in kiosks were just located in front of the sales centre. We had to print our own boarding pass and luggage tags.

Indeed, this was my very first encounter with budget airline, and learnt that it really required some mathematical problem solving skills to ensure that the luggage weight we bought (which was 20 kg) was well utilised. We weighed our luggage and removed a couple of items to ensure that the maximum number of luggage could be checked in.

Then we checked in our luggage at the designated area....

before entering the departure gate

Here's the transit area where passengers wait for their flights.

The plane arrived late, and as a result, we departed about 1 hour 30 minutes late. Nevertheless, we saw people started queuing up quite early (even before the gate opened). That actually made me wonder - would it be "free seating" again??? However, it should not be the case since the airline had provided services like preferred seat and meal at the point of ordering. Free seating would lead to chaos, in this case. After a while, we concluded that probably many of these passengers did not buy luggage weight and therefore were carrying more stuff, hence they needed to 'secure' a space at the overhead compartment to store their stuff first.

Noticed that the air plane did not park itself beside the bridge?
It's one of those rare occasion that the passengers needed to walked down and up the steps to the plane.

Something caught my attention as I settled in the plane - advertisements were splashed all over! Is this one of the ways that budget airlines generate revenue? Hm... I wonder...

Boarding the plane...