Hi David Interesting you emtnion air asia. I hope to embark on a trip in july with theim would be interested to know if you flew from australia with them and how you found it. Was the seat still the amin issue? Will be interesting to see if there is any karaoke in Cambodia or Macau. Regards

REPLY from David
According to the Air Asia person who responded to my email question about a month after I sent it, only their KL to London flights have reclining seats. My KL to Gold Coast flight was nightime, and a real nightmare - I was not the onnly person complaining about the seats - sitting with the upper part of your body bolt upright means your head constantly flops forward, and the 'wings' on the headrest were both too weak to stay in position and pointless, and moving the base of the seat forward to recline only the lower part of your body just pointlessly traps your knees against the seat in front. My flight back was daytime, and ok because I stayed awake and kept shifting position trying to find a comfortable one. I've just flown KL to China and back, daytime both ways, and the 5 hour trip is about the maximum I could endure even in the XL seats (most of my reason for choosing AirAsia for that journey is for safety, in that they use new planes, versus the Wright Brothers' models used by Malaysian Airlines and East China, Southern China, Chine Air etc. I'd do Australia again on Air Asia, KL to Perth, but wouldn't do any other Australian destination due to its longer duration. Plus points for Air Asia are newness of planes, cuteness of staff, paying only what what you want. Negatives are seat, brainlessness of staff (cannot remember who wanted water in the time it takes to walk up the back and get it), airports which can be a long way from the normal ones and, in the case of Gold Coast, have no useful transport links, and having to insist on prepaid luggage, meals and airport-connections because staff seem to have no record of what is booked and paid. In short, almost everything organised by the company as part of its system is great (except for the seats, and I presume the person who bought the planes has since been sacked), and pretty much everything left up to AirAsia staff is a disaster. Macau didn't have all the entertainment activity around the casinos that I'd expected - it's just hordes of middle-aged mainland Chinese gambling and smoking incessently. The karaoke places I found were the big establishments with small rooms, and the couple with 'karaoke halls' were purely Chinese, dreadful schreeching singing and trying to fend off drunk businessmen - rather like mainland China. There will undoubtedly be some small back street 'karaoke halls', but I didn't find any. Macau was a bit like HongKong twenty years ago, rude locals and no one interested in anything other than how much money you'll pay, very little English spoken as the locals speak Cantonese, but most of them will also speak slow and broken Mandarin which would suit me fine if only I could have found a local with a smidgen of commonsense. I haven't been to Cambodia, but I did see a Lonely Planet episode (I think it was Cambodia) where karaoke was running in an outdoor bar, so it may be that there's karaoke available in a number of these small places and available for anyone to grab the mic and song. I'll post this into the AskDavid forum so anyone with more knowledge can help.
Submitted by music334 on 17-05-2009

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