Review of Thai Smile flight Bangkok → Ubon in Economy

Introduction

Hello,

Given that it was now time to head to my wife's parents to start our wedding ceremony for her parents, we either had an option to go by train to Sisaket or by plane to Ubon Ratchathani and rent a car from there. We opted for the later option as that is simply more convenient for us with the amount of luggage we were travelling. This flight was originally scheduled to depart around 7 PM when we booked it and was the latest option for a flight to Ubon from both Bangkok Suvarnabhumi and would be the only option we could have taken given the Vietravel flight we booked that was arriving in Bangkok. Unfortunately Vietravel canceled our flight and forced us to rebook on a THAI flight from Hanoi giving us a stopover in Suvarnabhumi of over 6 hours….. Luckily a few hours later we received a notification from THAI Smile that our flight had changed and would now depart at 4pm…. Great news as this meant that we only had 4 hours to kill rather than 6 a 7.

A few months prior to the flight, THAI also announced that they will not continue with the THAI Smile concept and that the airline will be ceasing operatings and be merged back into THAI. This meant that this was going to be the last flight of both of us on THAI Smile.

Flight

After arriving from Hanoi about 45 minutes ago with all formalities completed, me and my wife went up to the departure hall to check in our luggage. As my luggage and my wife's luggage was over the limit of 20kg, I expected to pay an additional fee for the remaining kilo's as the website did not allow us to book additional weight.

Given that the domestic departures are around the B section, I made my way to there and it's somehow good to see Suvarnabhumi being back to it's busy times as it used to be pre-covid.

As I obtained my boarding card and luggage tag via one of the self-checkin counter, I made my way to the drop off counter, which didn't allow me to drop my luggage as it was over the allowance I booked. The friendly chap who was there to support people in case they needed it told me to follow him and checked my luggage in for no additional charge via one of the staffed counter. If only European airlines were this flexible :).

With about three hours to departure, I checked my priority pass whether I had allowance to any of the domestic lounges. It turns out that you can either join the Miracle, Coral Lounge and/or Royal Silk Lounge. Given that Miracle isn't really impressive for the domestic departures, I decided to give the Coral Lounge a shot.

For a domestic departure, the food offering was decent to above average with a selection of hot food, fruit and some desserts. It had also a manned alcohol counter if you opted for a cocktail or a beer. Oddly no wine was served they said while the chap next to me had a glass of wine?

With about 20 minutes to departure, we made our way to our gate.

Gate B4 was our gate to Ubon Ratchathani. Not much later, an announcement was made by ground staff that boarding would be delayed by about 15 minutes.

HS-TXM will bring us to Ubon Ratchathani's on today's flight. This Airbus A320 is 9.8 years old (at time of flying) and has solely been flying for THAI Smile. It is also named after the capital of Thailand ''Krung Thep Maha Nakhon'', which is the official name for the city of Bangkok.

Boarding was called exactly 15 minutes past our boarding call as the announcement said. Unlike my previous flight from Hanoi to Bangkok, the welcome here was very friendly with lots of smiles. 

Seat pitch is standard and sufficient for short flights like ours today.

Literature in your seat pocket was just a safety card and a sickbag.

Cabin however wasn't really the cleanest as you can see in the photos below with a lot of dust and dirt on seats.

The view of the cabin.

26 minutes past our scheduled departure, we were on our way to the runway with the long line of stored aircraft from THAI and a Boeing 767 of SF Airlines (Chinese Cargo Airline) waiting for us to pass.

It didn't take much longer to be rolling for departure.

About 30 minutes into the flight, the flight attendants jumped into action to serve us a bottle of water, a wet wipe and something that is similar to a sausage roll.

Though it wasn't really a sausage, but some sort of gravy. The taste itself was rather bland and dry.

Coffee and Tea were served afterwards and the friendly flight attendant asked whether I wanted some milk and sugar with it.

Enjoying the view while sipping my coffee.

The rest of the flight went smoothly with the flight attendants stopping by a few times to collect any trash before being on short final of Ubon Ratchathani.

The sky was really beautiful by the time we started to disembark via jetbridge.

Baggage belt two was used for our flight and it didn't really take longer than five minutes for our bags to arrive.