I made my second beach holiday trip of the year, this time to Phuket. Went with a group of old friends over the weekend to chill out and just relax. As usual, with the frequent offers by the budget airlines, we managed to grab tickets at S$130 return on Tiger. Quite a good deal for tickets just bought slightly more than a month in advance. As I am sure almost all of us all very well-versed with the service (or lack-of) on budget airlines, this report would be mainly a pictorial one.
30 June 2011
Tiger Airways
TR 2154
Singapore (SIN) - Phuket (HKT)
A320
9V-TAB
Budget Class
Checked in 1.5hrs before the STD of 1820hrs. However the flight was retimed to 1855hrs due to late arrival of aircraft. Well, nothing new on Tiger.
9V-TAR just arrived back to base.
At 1845hrs, an announcement was made that the flight was further delayed to 1930hrs. Groans….. Our plane finally arrived at about 1920hrs. It was 9V-TAB, Tiger's oldest plane in its fleet in Singapore. 2nd time I am flying on it too.
Boarding started shortly after. There was no change of crew and no cleaning of aircraft either (will see why later).
All pax boarded. Flight was almost full! Great business for Tiger.
Awaiting pushback. Safety demo was done. Flight time announced to be 1hr20min at 37000ft.
Taxi to Rwy20L. Passing a SEAir A319 (ex-Tiger plane).
Takeoff from Rwy20C at about 2000hrs, almost 1.5hrs delay.
Night view of East Coast.
Tight seat pitch. All the seats were very worn out. A passenger's seat could not even stay upright and he had to be shifted to another seat before takeoff for safety reasons.
After a day of flights, the interior of the seat pockets were disgusting! Used tissues, immigration forms, wrappers, food crumbs ….. Gross!! I guess Tiger only clean their planes once a day. So the late evening flights would get real dirty cabins.
Reading materials in seat pocket. Tiger Tales was worn out.
Buy-on-board service was conducted, with sales of drinks and snacks. No hot food available on this short flight. Surprisingly, sales were quite good. Guess everyone were in their holiday mood. I did not buy anything though, but lets still take a look at the menu.
Descend and landed on Rwy27.
Parked at the gate. A Business Air B767-300 a distance away.
