LONE STAR
FLIGHT REVIEWS

After staying the night at a nearby hotel also owned by the AirAsia group, I went to the terminal around 2.5 hours before the flight. Just like the previous flight, my travel party and I did not select any seats. As a result, we were scattered, but this time, the algorithm found us seats across 4 rows, still with nobody being assigned a middle seat (well, technically, one of my family members got a middle, but she switched upon realizing her seat next to it was empty). We were not scattered anywhere, just being assigned seats with rows close to each other (2, 3, 4, 5), and all of us got the extra legroom seats, known as hot seats. The process was fully automated, with us printing the boarding pass and bag tags in a kiosk machine, then dropping the checked bags in an automated machine that uses mathematical rounding rules with a margin of error of 0.5kg. This resulted in less human involvement, and honestly, the staff members working in that area were so stressed out and short-tempered that they took it out on the passengers. There was a lot of yelling and patronizing language being spoken, with constant "faster, faster" and "come on, man," as if we were military enlistees bound for a boot camp. I could not blame them too much because some of the passengers were underprepared, but even the boarding gate staff members were much friendlier. They, and the fast bag delivery at YIA, were the primary reason why I gave a score of 29/40 and not worse.