Review of Garuda Indonesia flight from Singapore to Jakarta in Economy

NOTE: The publication of this report was held back until the US presidential election results were declared on 6 November, and Donald Trump was re-elected President, beating Kamala Harris convincingly. As such, I was so wrapped up in the enormous global impact of Trump’s triumph — be it politically, diplomatically or in terms of women’s and minorities’ rights — that it was a bit hard to find the headspace for completing this report until the weekend.

A small warning here: given the extraordinarily insane nature of the initial planned trip, the introduction is longer than usual, even though I’ve used a couple of spoilers. The report, too, packs in much more than what I’d expected it to at first, so it’s rather long — especially that Tourism Bonus at the end chronicling the day’s misadventures in Jakarta.

And please excuse my liberal bolding of words, like this: that’s what I do to make long paragraphs slightly easier to read, to highlight the important terms at a glance.

Background: The big, insane trip that wasn’t… and then the small, sane trip that was

First, the backstory. To coincide with Singapore’s Hari Raya Haji public holiday in the middle of June 2024 — or Eid al-Adha to most of the rest of the world — I had planned a massive Northeast Asian trip, booked mostly with credit-card miles, where I would be flying some of the world’s top-rated airlines (almost all from Northeast Asia) over four days. This would be similar to what Ben Schlappig from One Mile at a Time does when he reviews airline products, with little time outside an airport. Call me crazy, but I was actually going to spend two nights sleeping in Taipei Taoyuan Airport and one in Hong Kong International, and expect my Priority Pass lounge accesses to carry me through. If this labels me as a madman in your head — I think it most certainly will — you can stop reading right here! Just kidding…

Most importantly, I wouldn’t be leaving any airport, staying only within the transit area, given that Indian passports face little acceptability in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and visas are cumbersome. Not as horrific as the months-long waiting time for Schengen visas that many, Indians especially, face nowadays… but certainly not as easy-breezy as e-visa countries in ASEAN like Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia. A stack of documents for each, including a ‘Certificate of Employment’ — a term that mostly Filipinos, it seems, tend to mention online when applying for Japanese visas — and a physical visit to VFS Global or suchlike would’ve been far more effort than it was worth, so I thought (foolishly) that I could sidestep the issue altogether by never leaving any airport.

As the trip approached, the utter futility of all my meticulous planning started to dawn upon me. Very belatedly — better late than never — it struck me that there was no way in hell the staff at the Asiana counter at Changi would let me board the first flight, let alone any of the others. Ben Schlappig or other travel/miles-and-points bloggers are able to go on such review trips all across the globe — and exit the airport for brief hotel stays — because of their powerful passports, and moreover Ben has dual American and German citizenship. (For that matter, the Singaporean passport itself is now the strongest in the world!) But I, with my lowly Indian passport, simply can never dream of doing so, that too in a comparatively less-English-speaking part of the planet. And a continuously hopping itinerary like this would no doubt raise many questions from the authorities in not only Singapore, but also Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

TL;DR: the Indian passport is doomed (well… kind of) — but I still get to fly the A330-900neo, and to Jakarta!

Eventually, good sense prevailed, and I cancelled every single one of those tickets, sometimes paying a cancellation fee as high as S$100 (US$75), but not all that much was lost compared to the nightmare that would have ensued had I persisted with my lunacy. One city, however, I did preserve: Jakarta, the final destination of that trip, as I’d been fascinated by it for a long time given that it’s the second-most-populous metropolitan area in the world! Never mind that the Indonesian capital — for now, until Nusantara comes up — is a mind-boggling expanse of traffic and concrete, with precious little to offer to travellers, far from the tourism superpower that is Bangkok. I turned the failed, lunatic Northeast Asian review trip into one focusing on the Indonesian and Malaysian capitals of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur — and, in true avgeek style, fly a fifth-freedom airline (KLM) to connect those two.

That plan sounded familiar to me, given that my first flight on KLM — and, indeed, on the SkyTeam alliance and to Indonesia — had been a year prior, in June 2023, from Singapore to Denpasar. The plane itself (PH-BVD) was in the SkyTeam livery, and it was so momentous to me that I ranked it my favourite flight out of 27 in 2023. I’d returned to Singapore on two A330-300s of Garuda Indonesia via Jakarta, with special stickers of their own, and entrancing music to boot. I’d been very touched indeed by the hospitality of Garuda Indonesia, despite its recent struggles and the lack of new aircraft, and CGK T3 was a big plus as well (it’s bigger than Changi T3!) with its sprawling architecture. Naturally, this time I wanted to see how Jakarta was like outside the confines of Soekarno–Hatta International Airport, a.k.a. ‘W-triple-I’ — that’s its ICAO code, with Changi being W-triple-S — which lies in the far northwest of the city in the suburb of Tangerang. (Jakarta itself lies to the northwest of Java island, though not quite the northwest of Indonesia as a whole.*)

With the Starlux A330-900neo being a much-anticipated component of my failed Northeast Asian trip, given all the rave reviews the Taiwanese airline has received, my hope was to fly the A330-900neo on Garuda Indonesia instead. Since GA is the only major flag carrier in Southeast Asia to never have ordered the A350 or 787 — unlike SkyTeam partner Vietnam Airlines with its sizeable fleets of both — this is the most modern aircraft the airline has. Moreover, it has only three A330-900neos (PK-GHE, GHF and GHG), plus two more (PK-GYA and GYC) that operate Hajj flights for low-cost subsidiary Citilink, so snagging this would be an especially rare feat. (Some other Southeast Asian low-cost airlines also operate the A330-900neo, namely fellow Indonesian carrier Lion Air — exclusively on Hajj flights — as well as Cebu Pacific in the Philippines and formerly Thai AirAsia X, but their 9-abreast layout is nowhere near comfortable.)

Fortunately Fate was kind to me this time — unlike with all the switches to the Thai Airways 777-200ER (twice in August 2024, sadly, both to and from Bengaluru) — and it was indeed PK-GHE that I got for this leg, GA829. This was a breezy, beautiful afternoon flight with astoundingly beautiful islands outside the window for company, and a crisp HD entertainment system (though no moving map?!). In fact, the Colours magazine (which was absent before) had now made a comeback with its superb photo features, and that was another massive plus. Combined with the ever-friendly, beaming service and great food, this flight cemented GA as one of the all-around loveliest boutique airlines I’ve flown, right up there with my perennial favourite, SriLankan. If not for the limited widebody fleet and international destinations, I’d go out of my way to fly Garuda more often! (And eventually I’d get rid of my fear of flying any 737 — let alone the MAX — with a domestic leg on Malaysia Airlines from Kuala Lumpur to Johor Bahru, just north of Singapore, to end this trip. That’s for another day.)

*Interestingly that’s also true of Milan, Istanbul and Seoul, which all lie to the northwest of their countries, with their respective airports (MXP, IST and ICN) lying a long way northwest — or at least west, in ICN’s case — of the city like CGK!

Pre-departure: Pretty planes and Pétit Prince

Friday, 14 June, morning. Though PK-GHE had operated only to Singapore for the past two days, on GA828/829 during the daytime and GA836/837 in the evening — I’d flown GA836 the previous year — there was still the slightest chance that the oldest of only three A330-900neos at Garuda Indonesia might not turn up on the day. As such, I went to the seatmap on the GA website and confirmed that my flight would indeed be operated by the A330-900neo, and PK-GHE in particular, given that PK-GHF was under maintenance and PK-GHG was flying elsewhere. (The three A330-300s in the PK-GH series, PK-GHA, GHC and GHD — Garuda avoids the letter B in registrations — were all flying to or from Sydney or Melbourne.)

Then I completed the online check-in process, mighty pleased that even though I hadn’t been able to catch Starlux’s A330-900neo, at least I’d managed to finally get Garuda’s elusive A330-900neo — my only A330 of 2024!

Soon enough, the inevitable was confirmed: PK-GHE had started out for Changi for the third day straight. Later my dad sent out a word of warning, saying that Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were (statistically speaking) not as safe as Singapore — though I’ve never had to worry about it in my travelling experience, and being male also reduces the risk a fair bit (not that girls shouldn’t travel there alone!).

An hour later, I started from my seaside apartment complex in the east of Singapore and headed on the fifteen-minute ride towards Changi. En route on this beautiful summer day, I saw a Cebu Pacific A321neo (RP-C4142) — as caught on Flightradar24 above — make a landing as 5J814 on Manila.

At the end of January 2025, for the Chinese New Year holiday, I’ll be flying Cebu Pacific from Manila myself — and (hopefully) on the same A330-900neo as this Garuda flight!

Soon enough, the Honda Shuttle — a stretched version of the Fit/Jazz — sprinted towards Terminal 3. On a sign for Door 4 I spied the logos of both today’s airline, Garuda Indonesia, and Gulf Air of Bahrain, which I’d flown in November 2023 on the GF166 fifth-freedom from Bangkok. (Spoiler alert: exquisite typography and branding, swanky 787-9 cabin, but shoddy catering!)

That GF fifth-freedom route now no longer exists, having been axed at the end of the northern summer schedule on 26 October 2024… though Bahrain’s only passenger airine hasn’t pulled out of Singapore altogether. Quite the opposite, in fact: the BAH–SIN sector has ramped up its weekly frequencies, but still it’s a sad end to an exotic way to fly between Southeast Asia’s two most renowned cities — even though Cathay Pacific has stepped into the red-hot BKK–SIN sector in the meantime.

Inside Terminal 3, which has now become my most frequented terminal at Changi (overtaking Terminal 1), I headed straight to the Garuda counters. My word, the displays and signages all looked pretty dashing, in fetching shades of blue and aqua… but the same couldn’t be said for the boarding passes. (Indeed colourful boarding passes seem to have become the exception and not the norm, which is why Air India’s striking new boarding passes stand out all the more!)

Interestingly, Garuda operates out of Terminal 3 at both Changi and its home of Soekarno–Hatta at Jakarta. The difference being that CGK T3 is used by almost all international full-service airlines at Jakarta — as is also the case at Delhi T3 — whereas T1 is a domestic terminal and T2 a low-cost terminal. On the other hand, Changi is of course an all-international airport, with no domestic flights… unless someone, five years hence, in the age of electric air taxis, has the bright spark to launch air shuttles to the tiny Seletar Airport (XSP) in the north of Singapore!

As I often repeat to myself when trying to understand Southeast Asian airport terminals: ‘Bangkok has one terminal, Kuala Lumpur two, Jakarta three and Singapore four.‘

An interesting exhibition was going on past the check-in counters: Le Pétit Prince or The Little Prince, the famous book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that had now been turned into a full-blown merchandise franchise à la Tintin. While the author may not have approved of such commercialisation, the way an iconic book was turned into a series of adorable collectibles was admirable, not to mention beneficial in helping to spread the word about it! I was half-tempted to follow the instructions that said ‘Place Hand on the Handle to Help The Little Prince Water His Roses!’, but thought the better of it. (Full resolution here.)

For that matter, nearly a year prior (July 2023), a similar French-themed exhibition had taken place at Changi T2 — before my Ethiopian 787-9 flight on a four-hour trip to Kuala Lumpur — for the painter Claude Monet, entitled ‘Monet: A Journey through Seasons at Changi’.

Changi Terminal 3: Glittering, as always

This was my first flight out of Changi in nearly four months — with the last arrival being in February on an SQ A350 from Mumbai — though I did cross the land border to Malaysia several times in the meantime to experience the neighbouring city of Johor Bahru across the strait. As such, it felt incredibly fulfilling to step out of Singapore’s borders and into the airside area of Southeast Asia’s foremost transit hub, en route to CGK, which remains the busiest airport in the Southern Hemisphere, ahead of Sydney, Johannesburg and even São Paulo–GRU. (Changi is the 17th-busiest in the world and Soekarno–Hatta the 32nd-busiest, as per 2023 statistics.)

Beyond the Louis Vuitton boutique and the gleaming-new Lotte Duty Free, there was a most fascinating-looking Indonesia AirAsia A320 — PK-AZR in the charming ‘Come to Lake Toba’ livery — that had arrived as QZ266 from the same city I was headed to now. (Curiously, this bird was delivered to QZ as PK-AXG in 2008, and re-registered as PK-AZR in 2023!) Further in the distance stood an SQ A380 whose registration I could not identify, and beside it 9V-SGE, an A350-900ULR.

My own A330-900neo, PK-GHE, was doing a little loop-the-loop before coming to land, with some other interesting visitors being a Turkish A350, an Etihad 787-10 and — from Indonesia — a TransNusa A320, a My Indo Airlines 737-300 freighter and a fellow Garuda aircraft, a 737-800 from Surabaya.

I’ve strolled through and traversed many of T3’s corridors, especially the part leading up to the big Chanel arch ad leading to the B gates. But this time I did have to stop for a moment: I converted roughly $90 SGD to 1 million IDR at a Travelex forex counter, which goes to show just how strong the Singapore dollar is and just how weak the Indonesian rupiah is (with only the Vietnamese dong beating it as East Asia’s weakest currency)!

And there she came, the raccoon eyes and curved winglet making a sexy statement, and the aquamarine/turquoise tail giving stiff competition to Thai Airways in the world’s-best-livery stakes. An A330-900neo like PK-GHE is a rare sight for a struggling airline with practically next to nothing on the order books, so I was especially lucky to have caught this bird today.

Note: Some SkyTeam airlines — particularly the largest European members (Air France–KLM, Virgin Atlantic) and the alliance’s newest member, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) — have been intentionally hiding the SkyTeam logo from ads, banners and many other brand assets. In fact, Air France–KLM have de-emphasised the SkyTeam logo so much that it has been removed from the front of the aircraft, beside the cockpit, and moved next to the registration at the rear.

Fortunately, non-European members of the alliance (as well as some European members, like Air Europa and ITA Airways) have not resorted to this idiocy — but Garuda Indonesia has now, sadly, been taping up the SkyTeam logo at the front of some of its 737s, though A330s are spared.

I briefly popped into the Sony Store, which was running its annual Sony Days promotions — now tied in with The Garfield Movie (hence the ‘purr-fect’ deals!) — and was sorely tempted to buy a pair of wireless earbuds, but thought the better of it. After all, why wouldn’t you make good use of a currency that’s 10,000 times weaker — I mean, cheaper — than your home currency?

I didn’t mill around all that much, and didn’t waste time and dollars on food, instead heading straight to the gates.

Mom was a bit worried where I was going, and wanted the details of how far along the security totem pole I’d progressed. Ektu to bolbi re… Ma to boshe achhe (Please speak a bit, your mother’s waiting for you), she said in Bengali, my mother-tongue. A mother’s concern knows no bounds!

Presently another Jakarta-originated plane landed: this being 9V-SWI, one of three SQ 777-300ERs in the white Star Alliance livery, with 9V-MBL, a 737 MAX 8, being the only other SQ plane today in this livery.* For many readers this will bring to mind 9V-SWM, another SQ 777-300ER in this livery — the third being 9V-SWJ — which was involved in the deadly SQ321 air turbulence incident on 21 May 2024 that claimed the life of an elderly passenger. That plane was parked at Bangkok for two months, having suffered extensive damage, before returning to service in July.

*But SQ isn’t the only one with the white Star livery any more: Croatia Airlines now has 9A-CTO, a sharkletted A320 — astonishingly, built all the way back in 2004 (winglets fitted in 2016) — in the white Star Alliance livery.

Interestingly this bird was painted in the regular black-tailed Star Alliance livery for most of its history, flying as CS-TNP for TAP Air Portugal from 2006 to 2022, before moving base from Lisbon to Zagreb. (Indeed, it has only ever spent its time in Mediterranean countries, with its first two years at Air Malta as 9H-AER. Now that’s a lot of 9 prefixes: 9H, 9A, 9V, 9M…)

At length I reached the B gates, with the tell-tale Bleu de Chanel arch ad at the entrance — a more masculine fragrance than the Chanel N°5 I saw here before. Sadly the gates at T3 are largely high-ceilinged, compared to the low-ceilinged ones at T1 and T2 which I somewhat prefer. I could already see the tail, and the XL-sized registration, of my A330-900neo, and I skipped along the travellators past the numerous Huawei ads to get there.

Indeed I have a kind of phobia of high ceilings in general, but T4 is an exception — as I found out in August before a late-night Cathay Pacific flight — where the high ceilings are spacious and welcoming instead of inducing agoraphobia like these gates! (The fact that T4 has no at-gate security like T3 and the other terminals, with centralised security instead, has a lot to do with it.)

It was Gate B7 once again, as was the case back in November 2023 on the SriLankan Airlines A330-300 — my SQ A380 to Mumbai in December used B5 instead — and I was well ahead of time. That’s a nice thing to have, given the number of times I’ve only turned up at the gate at ‘Final Call’!

As I went through the security check, a Malaysia Airlines 737-800 landed (I could also spy a small bit of a Vistara A321neo in the jetbridge body) while an A321neo of Garuda’s alliance partner Vietnam Airlines pulled towards the SQ Star 777. Another SkyTeam carrier — a cargo 747 this time from China Airlines — also made an appearance soon enough.

I whiled the time by writing a list of GA’s surprisingly few international destinations on a pink electronic slate of mine. The airline has heavily scaled back its network outside Indonesia, with Singapore being one of only three Southeast Asian destinations, BKK and KUL being the others, and the only one to be served by widebodies (from CGK; the flights from Denpasar and Surabaya are on 737s). That said, as far as longhaul flights are concerned Garuda has a couple of very exotic routes, like one linking Manado (MDC) on the island of Celebes/Sulawesi to Tokyo (Narita) — which I incorrectly wrote in my caption below as ICN (oops!) — with the flight originating from Denpasar/Bali (DPS), and another being from Jakarta to Doha!!!

That one’s very unusual for a non-Oneworld carrier, given that Qatar (Airways) has thrown in a lot of incentives for the likes of Iberia, Finnair and JAL to fly to DOH — but not Cathay Pacific or QR’s arch-enemy Qantas. Nevertheless, this SkyTeam carrier, despite its severely restricted financials and fleet, does indeed have a flight there and a codeshare agreement with one of Oneworld’s highest-profile members to ferry transit passengers to the Gulf megahub.

Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Tokyo (both NRT and HND), Seoul/Incheon, Guangzhou and Shanghai (but not Beijing) are the rest of Garuda’s Asia-Pacific routes, many served less than daily. But none are as vital as Jeddah and Medina, the Hajj hubs served with both GA’s own 777s and various leased aircraft, or as prestigious — and loss-making! — as partner KLM’s home Amsterdam, served only twice weekly, with the only two 777s (PK-GIF/GIG) in the fleet with First Class today.

This done, I entered my flight and accommodation details on the Indonesian immigration and customs portal, after which I was presented a QR code to show to customs at Jakarta. I then had a look at the intriguing once-weekly Denpasar–Manado-Tokyo route: one of only two Garuda international routes not from CGK or DPS, with the other being Surabaya (SUB) to Singapore (which had arrived not long ago!).

All too soon, it was time to board, as two arrivals from Kuala Lumpur landed: a Batik Malaysia 737 MAX — nope, not the Indonesian one (it doesn’t have 737 MAXes) — and an SQ A350. Another China Airlines aircraft, a passenger A350 this time, also touched down shortly thereafter.

Indeed, most Southeast Asian flights departing Taipei tend to be well before 3pm, with hardly any redeyes. In fact, the last daily flight from Singapore to Taipei is EVA Air’s BR216, which departs Changi at 3:45pm (there’s nothing at all after that in the evening hours) — and which I’ve booked as my first flight of 2025, ahead of Starlux’s A330-900neo in business class!!!

On another note, besides the myriad arrivals from near and not-so-far, my mother wished me a safe and pleasant flight to ‘Djakarta’. That spelling me always reminds me of the Tintin classic, Flight 714 to Sydney, and I said as much! (I took ‘Flight 714’ on SQ to BKK in December 2022, and again on CX to HKG in August 2024, which I mentioned above when talking about Changi T4.)

And now it was finally time to step on board the latest and greatest aircraft of this wonderfully, genuinely delightful but perpetually mismanaged airline — the only major one in Southeast Asia with not a single A350 or 787 — and see how those pretty exterior colours (and the centre-of-the-fuselage titles, found only on Garuda’s A330s) translated into a pretty onboard product!

The flight: Boarding and departure

Flight: Garuda Indonesia GA829/GIA829
Date: Friday, 14 June 2024
Route: Singapore Changi (WSSS/SIN) to Jakarta Soekarno–Hatta (WIII/CGK)
Aircraft: PK-GHE, Airbus A330-900neo
Age: 4 years 8 months at the time (built: 28 October 2019, delivered: 14 November 2019)
Seat: 51K (starboard side, window)
Boarding: 11:50am SGT, UTC +8 (10:50am WIB, UTC +7)
Departure: 12:35pm SGT (11:35am WIB)
Arrival: 1:10pm WIB (2:10pm SGT)
Duration: 1 hour 35 minutes

Notes:
• First-ever flight on the A330-900neo, of which Garuda Indonesia has only three (PK-GHE/GHF/GHG), not counting two more (PK-GYA/GYC) that operate Hajj flights for Citilink. It is highly unlikely that Garuda will move forward with its March 2021 order of four A330-800neos in the near future, which would have made it the world’s only operator of all A330 variants (-200, -300, -800neo and -900neo)!

I’ve also booked the A330-900neo on Taiwanese premium carrier Starlux Airlines — in BUSINESS CLASS!!! thanks to Alaska miles — from Taipei to Ho Chi Minh City on 11 January 2025. This is a date that holds special significance for me, as that was the date I flew Singapore Airlines for the first time, in 2022, as well as now-defunct regional subsidiary SilkAir for the first and only time in 2020!

• Third flight on Garuda Indonesia and fifth overall on SkyTeam, after KLM to Denpasar (PH-BVD in SkyTeam livery) and two Garuda A330-300s with special stickers in June 2023, and a Vietnam Airlines 787-10 at the end of December, the final of 27 flights in 2023. Two days after GA829 came another KLM flight: KL810 (787-9, PH-BHL) from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur, which I’m reviewing next.
(As such, all my flights on this alliance involved either Indonesia or Vietnam so far, mostly the former — and in fact I’ve only ever flown to, from and within Indonesia on Garuda and KLM so far. In the distant future I might add a transit on Korean Air or China Airlines, but that’s a very long shot… which only goes to show just how irrelevant SkyTeam tends to be for many global travellers.)

Sadly, PK-GHE was to be my only A330 in 2024, even though I did finally manage to get the A330-900neo — which I’ll be flying again with Starlux in January 2025. Neither could I fly my favourite SriLankan Airlines’s A330 in 2024 — I’d flown an old A330-200 (twice) and a newer A330-300 on them in 2023 — nor did its Oneworld partner Cathay Pacific give me its A330-300 on CX755 (HKG–BKK) on 6 August. Instead it sent me an A350 (B-LRP) that was a carbon copy of the previous one (B-LRT as CX714 from Singapore), and which was furthermore hit with a severe technical snag resulting in a 90-minute delay… more than enough to make me miss the Thai Airways headquarters’ restaurant, which closes for the day early in the afternoon!

A small glimpse of what could have been… if Garuda didn’t head down the path of ruin

Annisa, dressed in a scarlet/vermilion sarong, greeted passengers and showed them to their seats. The 1-2-1 business-class product (the Stelia Opal) is as good as it gets for a regional hard product, without resorting to sliding doors and other such innovations that even SQ has been falling short of. Of course I wouldn’t be turning left today — that’s for January 2025 on a different A330-900neo from Starlux — but if you do want to know how that product is like, the ever-comprehensive Jakarta Potato blog has reviewed it in the other direction (CGK–SIN) on the inbound GA828. If you want to know anything at all about Indonesian inflight experiences, you go to this guy first!

Moreover, it’s a drastic improvement from the 2-2-2 B/E MiniPod recliners found on Garuda’s previous batch of A330-300s (PK-GPT–GPY) built in 2014–15. Besides the three 2019-built A330-900neos (PK-GHE/GHF/GHG), four 2016-built A330-300s (PK-GPZ and GHA/GHC/GHD) have the Collins Aerospace Super Diamond lie-flats, so it’s these seven A330s that you’ll be hoping for — similar to fellow struggling island carrier SriLankan and its seven A330-300s (4R-ALL–ALR) which are its only relatively modern widebody aircraft.

I, on my part, went to my window seat and lo and behold! There was a PHYSICAL INFLIGHT MAGAZINE!!! Colours, GA’s inflight magazine, was nowhere to be seen on both my flights with them in June 2023, but had been revived in September — and what a beautiful sight it was. Combined with the pretty HD screen and a proper airline and alliance logo on it — something that KLM refrains from doing — it was a great start to a sublime noontime flight.

Now the China Airlines A350 came to a standstill at the adjacent gate, and this brought to mind another brush with the CI A350 at Jakarta the previous June. Indeed my (cancelled) insane itinerary contained a China Airlines A350 on the very same route (CI761, TPE–CGK) as then, but now that I’d very wisely let go of that insanity, I was more than relieved to have another view of a CI A350 out of my window than actually be sitting in one.

Next to that stood 9V-SWI, SQ’s 777-300ER which had arrived from Jakarta. The post-dash part of the registration succinctly captured the ICAO codes of the origin and destination airports for both that Star Alliance-liveried 777 and my own A330-900neo: SWI = WSSS + WIII!

This was by far the clearest, highest-resolution IFE I’ve had on GA, with picturesque photos of tranquil islands, temples and jungles and welcomes in as many as six languages — but I’m afraid the glare from the windows doesn’t do it any justice. Also, there wasn’t any mention of Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choices on this system as there was on an A330-300, PK-GHC, the year before.

For comparison, here’s how the IFE looked like on the two Garuda A330-300s that I’d flown the previous June: the newer IFE on PK-GHC (DPS–CGK), with much clearer pictures of the welcome screens than this one, and the much older IFE on PK-GPU (CGK–SIN). Despite this chasm in the IFE age, the aircraft themselves were built at a similar time (2016 and 2014, respectively) — though Garuda has much older A330s than that, dating back to the 1990s, but all remain parked at CGK.

For their part, the bulkhead screens alternated between Selamat Datangs from smiling female cabin crew in bibrant sarongs, and a moving map showing the current path route. The irony of Garuda continuing to display a prominent Skytrax 5-Star Airline certificate beside the central bulkhead screen — in spite of its drastic network and product cutbacks, dishevelled lounges and lack of fleet orders — was not lost on me. However, as long as the service and food remains top-class, I’m more than happy!

When my A330-900neo showed up on Flightradar24, it oddly displayed the flight number GA827, instead of the requisite GA829. I had no time to dwell over this peculiarity, because my attention had been grabbed by a Virgin Australia 737-800 (VH-VUJ) — by no means a common sight at Changi, unlike Qantas’ A380s and A330s — that would now take off for Brisbane after, I presume, having had maintenance done on it here.

Strangely, there was no safety video and only a manual safety demo on this flight, despite the advanced nature of the IFE, and that’s a trend that would continue even on the next KLM flight on a 787-9 from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur two days later. That’s probably a good thing, for two reasons: (a) the safety video’s audio is exclusively in Bahasa Indonesia, with English subtitles; and (b) there’s a very irritating-to-most young woman who insists on intruding on other people’s privacy and keeps on snapping pictures with her phone — including of another girl meditating by herself in the rice fields — as her partner looks on.

Still, not a bad video by any means (a rather stunning-looking one at that, given Indonesia’s Instagrammability) but certainly one I could do without for now… though missing out on KLM’s innovative, ingenious Delft-tiles-themed video was quite the bummer! For that matter, even Air India’s cutting-edge A350 in February failed to show its new dance-themed safety video, though in fairness it had been introduced only two days before my flight.

Meanwhile the A330neo brushed past Terminal 1, or Terminal One(world) as I like to nickname it, given that most of that alliance’s members are based at T1 except SriLankan (T3) and Cathay Pacific (T4). Today, though, it seemed I’d be getting none of that: instead a Thai Airways 777-300ER and some random Scoot A320/1s came into view.

Before I knew it, PK-GHE was zipping through the Changi runway at top speed, and all of a sudden carried me up and away — over the pair of Cathay A350s, over my seaside home and over the iconic ships of Singapore, until there was nothing left but the tranquil blue of sea and sky (and the vivid shades on the A330neo winglet) with a canopy of clouds and the odd island for company.

Garuda’s inflight entertainment (and advertising)

Now I had a look at what Garuda’s latest-and-greatest entertainment offering (not too great, mind you!) had to offer. This newish system — in contrast to the ‘skinnable’ one (with a few colour variations) on other A330s, 777s and most 737s — uses the widespread Noto Sans font and is also found on a few other boutique airlines, like the Fiji Airways A350.

Naturally, being the avgeek I am, I went straight to the inflight survey without blinking an eyelid — though I did do a double take at the underscores in the title, clearly indicating some sort of a programming variable, not to be displayed to a consumer. (Full resolution here.)

The mostly-female cabin crew rolled out their carts very shortly after takeoff, which was impressive, and the mood lighting took on those special orange-and-purple tones that I so fondly associate with new planes like this. Shortly, a series of Indonesian-focused (and not very international) ads began to play — not that I minded them one bit! They do show, however, that GA has become very inward-looking and domestic-oriented in terms of clientele, no longer being able to keep up with the global colossus that is SQ.

First off was Bank BRI, one of the country’s largest state-owned banks, promoting its BRImo all-in-one lifestyle app with (as you’d expect) pretty twentysomething girls (and boys) — and even a cat! (The term ‘millennial’ is increasingly becoming invalid for those younger than 30, and I wouldn’t describe myself as one, never mind that I was literally born in 2000… the year of the new millennium.)

Interestingly, my Garuda A330-300 the previous June (PK-GPU) in the other direction (CGK–SIN) featured a small sticker for the BRImo app near the front of the fuselage. Garuda also has a 737-800, PK-GFJ — and formerly also PK-GFI (until September 2024) — promoting another major Indonesian state-owned bank, Mandiri, and its Livin’ by Mandiri lifestyle app.

Below are some pictures of PK-GPU (a very plain A330) and the two 737s: PK-GFJ (colourful enough) and a pair for PK-GFI (the most vibrant of the lot), sourced from Planespotters.net. All copyright belongs to the respective photographers. (Don’t ask me why they covered up the SkyTeam logo at the front… maybe copying Air France?)

Back to my flight, the next ad was for a Singaporean bank this time: UOB — more precisely its Indonesian division — with much more men than women, and suited-and-booted ones at that compared to the flashy girls with wavy hair and peppy clothes in the BRI ad!

In any case, UOB’s intention was to promote its Garuda Indonesia cobrand card, with all its bonus spend categories. But banks in Singapore, like Citi and HSBC, have more or less shunned GarudaMiles as a miles transfer partner — with Flying Blue being the default (and, mostly, only) SkyTeam option, aside from the odd Vietnam Airlines LotusMiles.  (Other banks, like DBS and UOB Singapore, have only KrisFlyer and Asia Miles — they don’t even have Qatar/British Avios, forget SkyTeam!)

Moreover GarudaMiles have somewhat limited utility nowadays given the airline’s rather sparse network outside the archipelago. Still, despite SQ being the ‘de-facto flag carrier’ of Indonesia — certainly so for the well-heeled elite who’re likely to go for premium cards, and hence fly SQ — it’s the local GarudaMiles and not KrisFlyer that the lion’s share (no pun intended!) of Indonesian banks partner with, from local ones like BNI, BRI and Mandiri to foreign ones like UOB.

These contrasting bank ads aside, a series of still ads were screened in succession, all promoting Garuda — though on my flight on SkyTeam partner Vietnam Airlines’ 787-10, the bank ads (and Vietnam has DOZENS of banks, mind you) were followed by ads for paints!

1. A partnership with Japanese isotonic drink Pocari Sweat; GA even has a 737-800 (PK-GNN) painted in the Pocari Sweat livery. As I mentioned above for Mandiri and BRI, Garuda continues to have a wide range of colourful liveries — mostly on its 737s, but also a few on A330s and 777s — over and above the silver SkyTeam colours.

2. Another, on behalf of Tourism Australia, with the airline flying from both CGK and DPS to both SYD and MEL. though none of these flights are daily. Competition is only from Qantas ex-Jakarta, but Denpasar is massively competitive, with Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin and even Batik Air Malaysia, continuing from Kuala Lumpur (KUL–DPS–SYD/MEL: that’s quite the haul!).

3. Some more ads for boarding-pass privileges and converting bank reward points to GarudaMiles. As many as 21 Indonesian banks partner with the airline, though admittedly their utility for non-Indonesians is very limited — even though US blog UpgradedPoints has bravely written an article on GarudaMiles for American travellers. And lastly GarudaMiles Junior for younger travellers; this reminded me, notably, that SQ scrapped its ‘Young Explorer Club’ back in 2006!

On paper, it seems that Garuda is doing quite the intensive promotion and transfer-partner thing, but all that would’ve been much more useful if not for the fact that its utility to international travellers has severely fallen postpandemic, and it no longer has the halo effect that it did a decade ago. It continues to slump while fellow moneybleeders Thai Airways and Malaysia Airlines are on the upswing, inducting rafts of new aircraft (at least for TG) and launching new routes — like Oslo for TG and a return to Paris for MH — which Garuda simply cannot think of.

A Colourful surprise: The return of a pretty print publication

Now I turned to my seat pocket, and guess what I pulled out: the revived Colours magazine, which was missing on my Garuda flights in 2023! It was much better and well-expanded from the measly 40-page (mostly Bahasa Indonesia-only) issue that was published in the months leading up to COVID-19. (Full resolution here.)

This time it looked much more beefed-up with diverse content — though the most professional and Westernised inflight magazine in Southeast Asia (now that the physical SilverKris is dead) is Malaysia Airlines’ Going Places, which was also revived postpandemic and which I also managed to get hold of a few days later. Even Colours, though, is quite a bit above alliance compatriot Vietnam Airlines’ Heritage magazine in terms of reach and globalisation, since the latter is very inwardly focused towards Vietnamese-specific destinations.

There were quite a few photo features for me to enjoy, though of course Garuda’s international network is very limited at this point, with just the one European destination, the twice-weekly Amsterdam. Nevertheless, I’m very happy with what Garuda (and MH) did to revive their physical magazines, which SQ and TG (and EK and QR) continue to stay away from. (Full resolution here.)

Here are some more snippets, including the cover with technicoloured roofs of houses by a river (and that rather outdated ‘5-Star Airline’ claim), an ad asking readers to ‘experience the beauty of Doha’ — much if not most of which, I bet, is confined to Hamad Airport’s Orchard — and a unique insert: a feedback form (over and above the inflight survey) asking passengers what they thought, which I found to be a very special and thoughtful touch. (Full resolution here.)

And then of course you had Garuda’s airline-specific information pages, which again painted a professional picture, even though some parts were a bit too excessively detailed. (Full resolution here.)

And finally the most interesting pages of the magazine: the astoundingly pretty routemaps — though it’s really sad that the international network takes up half the space of the domestic (never mind the ad for the Pikachu jet below) — and the fleet details, with its handful of incoming aircraft all being secondhand 737s in the PK-GU* series. Finally, a maze for kids and a concluding photo feature, just the way SilverKris used to do. (Full resolution here.)

While Garuda’s fleet and international network will remain highly restricted for the foreseeable future — there’s no denying that it (along with fellow islander SriLankan) completely missed the modernisation bus compared to SQ or even TG — I really must applaud the airline for doing the very best it can with its limited resources, something that’s most evident in its magazine. Which brings me to the next section, a continuation of the doing-more-with-less theme.

Catering: A small touch with a big heart

Next I had a small look at the audio selection, the flight information — bizarrely, there was no moving map on this A330-900neo (just like the safety video) — and finally a section on the history of Garuda Indonesia, and a brand video from nearly a decade ago. (Full resolution here.)

These reminded me of nearby SkyTeam partner Vietnam Airlines’ multiple passenger-experience videos — above all the excellently produced corporate brand film — that highlighted just how far it’s come as a key regional player, continuing to ‘Reach Further’ (as its slogan goes) while Garuda continues to Tumble and Bleed Further!

The video, released in 2016, was at the zenith of Garuda’s global growth aspirations, riding on its newfound glory as one of the world’s most luxurious and hospitable airlines (a Skytrax 5-star one at that!) with a large fleet to follow. However, corruption and mismanagement have, along with (of course) the COVID-19 pandemic, laid it low and dealt it a heavy blow as SQ prospered. More on that in a bit…

No sooner had I started the video than the gaily coloured — no, ‘gaily’ (unlike ‘gay’) has nothing to do with homosexuality! — cabin crew started rolling out the meals, with a pretty turquoise sarong-kebaya-clad girl named Indah serving my aisle, and with her a male cabin crew by the name of Daud. There were no menus, rather only the standard chicken/fish choices — no need for a vegetarian option, I suppose — and yet catering is something where Garuda shines, while SQ, with its exhaustive food and wine coverage, manages to fumble intra-Southeast Asia! How? You’ll see…

I asked for the chicken meal (of course) and Indah placed a dainty tray on my tray table, along with two paper cups, for water and Sprite. This meal stood out for its simplicity and yet burst with flavour: be it the chicken-and-rice main with flavourful cabbage, the side salad of carrots or the red-velvet-cake dessert, this was an exercise in focusing on only what mattered for the meal and cutting out unnecessary accompaniments — save for the dry bread roll and butter, which more often than not isn’t required. And should someone really need salt or pepper, the friendly crew should be more than ready to help. Less is more!

This was similar to my first flight on Malaysia Airlines — and on the A330 — in October 2022, and indeed MH managed to cut out the bread-and-butter as well, which I’d appreciated at the time. I wish more airlines understood that bone-dry bread and generic Lurpak butter do more harm than good to the medley of flavours that’s otherwise present on the tray table. (I’m looking at you, Singapore Airlines, with all manner of accoutrements from milk-in-a-stick to subpar ice-cream whose utility is little more than dubious…)

In any case, this was the perfect inflight view of both earth (or, rather, sea) and sky as far as I’m concened, with the brilliant blue radiance of the water surrounding the small islands melding gorgeously with the azure skies and striated winglet carrying me above them. And with that red velvet cake, it was pure bliss as far as I was concerned. Once again, Garuda Indonesia had won in the delight-and-discover stakes!

What could’ve been and what didn’t: An old corporate video from 2016

It was now time for me to resume the nearly-decade-old Garuda corporate video from where I’d left off — and of course the airline highlighted its (especially female) cabin crew, and all the Skytrax awards it’s received for its product and for its ‘Garuda girls’ in particular. Make no mistake, this is an area where GA, for all its struggles and free-falling from grace, has never compromised as far as I’m concerned. Indonesian (girls’) hospitality really is like no other!

The next thing was a bunch of SkyTeam airlines’ tails, and again this was reminiscent of what I’d seen on Vietnam Airlines — though that video was made by the alliance rather than the airline, illustrating its COVID-19 principles, with every member airline’s livery (oddly enough) painted on a 777-300ER!

Here, though, the membership of what is usually considered to be the weakest of the three alliances (in terms of quality, coverage and elite benefits) was proudly promoted, as were the Garuda lounges — the flagship one at Jakarta has certainly seen better days — and the premium arrival services, now ostensibly also scaled back heavily.

The widebodies, the 777-300ER and A330-200 and -300, were highlighted next, and it’s sad that the 2-2-2 MiniPod product was still considered normal for a regional business-class product in 2016 — something that SQ upended in 2018 with a new regional J product on its 787-10s and medium-haul A350-900s.

For what it’s worth, I recently (November 2024) flew a Qatar Airways 777-300ER on the 40-minute hop from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. While I knew going in that this was an older 777 with the woefully non-private MiniPod seats, it sure doesn’t paint a good look for an airline that has repeatedly, and rightfully, trumpeted its Qsuite as the best in the world!

Funnily enough there wasn’t any mention of the A330-900neo, the very aircraft I was on now. Instead the video moved on to the narrowbodies, starting with the 737-800, which remains the mainstay of the GA fleet. Then there were as many as three now-retired aircraft types: the 737 MAX 8 — of which it only ever operated one, PK-GDA, with a very short service span — the CRJ1000 (PK-GR series), of which it operated 18 before retiring them in 2022, and the ATR 72 (PK-GA series), though some ATR 72s moved to low-cost subsidiary Citilink in the PK-GJ series.

All this served to highlight just how perpetually mismanaged an airline Garuda is, and how its fleet was chopped and changed over time according to the whims and fancies of whoever happened to be in power. Such a shame!

This video from 2016 concluded with lofty ambitions — over 200 aircrafts [sic], more than 600 daily flights — but all these goals and dreams are now a thing of the past, and a sad reminder of just how much Garuda Indonesia has lost its way since then. GA has completely missed the bus when it comes to its post-COVID fleet renewal strategy, where even fellow regional struggler Thai Airways has invested in taking on some secondhand A330s and has inducted several new A350s, while waiting for new 787s and A321neos.

Meanwhile Malaysia Airlines at least has some new planes slated for delivery — unlike Garuda, with zero new orders — but so far it’s only been able to induct four 737 MAXes (9M-MVA–MVD), while its first A330-900neo (9M-MNG) with a new business-class product has been heavily delayed.

I made a note of all this in my captions, at how Garuda Indonesia increasingly failed to realise its ambitions of being a global carrier — eliminating subtypes like the CRJ1000 and ATR 72 in the process — and never ordered any A350 or 787, with only a tiny handful of A330-900neos like this one, and a highly improbable A330-800neo order. All this while, however, regional SkyTeam partner Vietnam Airlines inducted quite the fleet of A350s and 787s, along with A321neos and a handful of A320neos, and even the 737 MAX. So near and yet so far!

TL;DR: Both Garuda and SriLankan are crippled by a dwindling fleet, an especially tiny one for the latter, but their welcoming smiles and hospitality are second to none! However, at least the all-Airbus Oneworld member is slowly inducting a couple of secondhand A320s and A330s and has a respectable, broad international network, neither of which can be said for Garuda.

Pristine coral islands on descent

Anyway, I wasn’t here to dwell on what could have been. The fact that I was flying an A330-900neo in the first place was an achievement in itself on Garuda’s part! All I had to do was sit back and enjoy the stunning views of the ocean outside the window… ahhhh, the joy! Meanwhile a couple of other FAs passed by, clearing the tables for final descent, and I admired their pretty uniforms.

Whatever little Garuda was able to do with its hard product, service and cuisine, I was more than happy with it. A thousand times better than 400-plus IndiGo A320neos and A321neos with little to no advances in the onboard product (not counting the new business class that’s being launched after Vistara’s demise)…

Not long before descent, this small, uninhabited island came into view, and it was indeed fitting that I was flying to the largest archipelagic country in the world, with some 18,000 islands, a third of them inhabited.

I was no longer interested in the IFE — there was no moving map, remember — and so I used the time to write down my journal entry (this time with stretched characters) in my usual purple, pink and orange highlighter pens.

All too soon, this idyllic 90-minute flight was drawing to a close, and PK-GHE swooped over the northwestern suburb of Tangerang before coming to a smooth landing at Soekarno–Hatta International Airport shortly after one o’clock.

If landing at Changi is marked by ships in the sea, and Kuala Lumpur by palm plantations, landing at Jakarta looks like clusters of houses spread over wide green fields, which then give way to sweeping views of a sprawling airport — with both traditional-looking terminals (1 and 2) and the future-forward T3. As ever so often, my iPhone’s storage was finished (for the time being) due to all the new videos and photos, and so I had to capture the landing with my secondary Android phone!

The taxi to the terminal was a quaint mix of tradition and modernity, with wide runways here and expressways outside, juxtaposed with the brick-roofed domestic terminals and their rows of Lion Air, Super Air Jet and Citilink narrowbodies — not to mention other smaller Indonesian airlines like Pelita Air and TransNusa.

Among the other interesting planes I could spot was PK-LKV, a 737-800 of Lion Air with a ’90th Boeing 737 Next Generation’ tail — a light purple in real life, but more greyish in the photo below. The plane was parked here since December 2022, and in August 2024 it was moved to the island of Batam (BTH) just south of Singapore.

It’s very noteworthy that of all the countless LCCs that operate the 737, Lion Air is perhaps the only one to have embraced the 737-900ER so wholeheartedly — a model that’s otherwise rarely seen outside the US. (Notably, in India, both SpiceJet and the erstwhile Jet Airways — big 737 operators in their heyday — have operated the -900ER.) So much so that even this 737-800 is in a minority in the Lion Air fleet, whereas it forms the majority of most other 737 operators’ fleets, Garuda included.

I updated my journal entry with a small note at the bottom that mentioned the soulful landing music and the pretty girls in kebayas!

It was finally time for me to step off this A330-900neo, a plane as striking from the exterior as it was fresh and modern inside. I took my belongings, went to the front door and bid the Garuda Girl — they can make that a trademark à la Singapore Girl — in the orange kebaya a terima kasih, before setting foot onto the unpredictable box of wonders that is Indonesia.

Never fail to surprise me, Jakarta — in both good ways and bad…

I’m quite a big fan of CGK T3’s spacious architecture, except the outdated signage perhaps, and while not Changi it’s a million miles above the dreary ugliness that is Bangkok Suvarnabhumi. In fact, it could have been a much bigger global hub than it actually is, being the 32nd-busiest airport in the world (and the busiest in the Southern Hemisphere) — if not for the fact that it’s driven mainly by domestic traffic, with much fewer international destinations than nearby Kuala Lumpur, the 35th-busiest in the world. (CGK has fewer than 90 destinations, compared to KUL’s 140+ and BKK and SIN’s 150+ — a big reason being CGK’s very limited flights to India (only Mumbai on IndiGo) and China compared to the other three.)

Anyway, it was with a spring in my step that I skipped towards Arrivals, while taking in the view of this clean, peaceful canal — which is more than can be said for half the water bodies in Jakarta — and a bunch of random domestic narrowbodies like a TransNusa A320 and a Garuda 737 (PK-GFS) with a ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ tourism sticker. On and on I went, until I eventually reached…

…a set of travellators with picture-pretty local art on one side, and a row of parked aircraft on the other. These included an EVA Air 777-300ER in the old livery, a SriLankan A321neo* and Garuda’s SkyTeam partners Vietnam Airlines (A321) and Xiamen Air (737 MAX 8), plus ex-member China Southern Airlines (Xiamen’s parent) with an A321neo. Indeed, the lion’s share of arrivees flew on Chinese or Taiwanese B- registrations, and the passengers heading towards imigrasi — or imigresen in Malaysia — reflected that.

*It really is impressive that despite SriLankan’s extremely limited fleet — barely 20 operational aircraft plus some more grounded — the Oneworld member still manages to fly to Jakarta, which isn’t as important a city for South Asians as the trifecta of BKK, KUL and SIN!

For comparison, can you even imagine Garuda flying to a big Southeast Asian metro like Manila or Ho Chi Minh City, much less a small city like Colombo? It’s telling that GA has just one daily 737 flight to BKK and KUL, and Singapore is the only ASEAN city with widebody flights. Indeed, there are no full-service flights between Jakarta and Hanoi — the capitals of two ‘SkyTeam countries’ — with VietJetAir being the only option, that too not daily.

With some effort I connected to the Wi-Fi network of Angkasa Pura II, the airport operator, while my cellular TSEL (Telkomsel) network stubbornly remained on EDGE. Throughout this trip I stuck resolutely to Singtel’s measly 1 GB-per-day roaming, though on two occasions — outside the airport, and later at Central Park megamall — I did consider a SIM card from its Indonesian arm, Telkomsel, as I’d done in Bali and later Batam in 2023, but, given the long activation time, thought the better of it.

The arrivals were naturally dominated by PK-registered aircraft, though these were still more diverse than the continuous succession of A320/1neos from IndiGo and Air India (plus the odd one from Vistara — RIP!) that most Indian airports have during daylight hours. Otherwise, the international arrivals were largely B-registered aircraft from Mainland China (China Southern, Xiamen Air) or Taiwan (EVA Air, China Airlines) — Starlux launched Jakarta service only in September, long after other ASEAN countries — aside from the odd VN (VietJetAir, Vietnam Airlines) or 9V from Singapore.

This aside, there were a couple of medium-/longhaul arrivals, namely an Oman Air 787 and the above SriLankan A321neo. And also a Korean Air 777-300ER (plus two HS-registered A320s from Thai VietJetAir and Thai AirAsia) that’d presumably come here for maintenance, having landed a few days before. On my part, I informed my family that I’d landed at W-triple-I, an airport located northwest of the most populous city in Southeast Asia, which itself lay to the northwest of the world’s most populous island! (As you can see, I totally love that direction…)

CGK T3 proclaimed itself, rightfully, as ‘the GaT3 of Indonesia’, with its sweeping décor that still managed to make space for the odd musholla (prayer room) to cater to the country’s Islamic majority. I went through one travellator followed by another, with swishing coconut-tree fronds on one side and a glittering skyline on the other, punctuated every so often by the odd perfumier or chocolatier. (There was also a plain but unusually, to me, heartfelt sign: Troli Anda — Your Trolleys! Third row below, left.)

This peaceful setting is in great contrast to Changi, where no sooner do you step off your aircraft than you find yourself in the very same corridor that other travellers use to catch their departing flights, before you trudge all the way to Arrivals. In fairness, Changi is the exception and not the norm, in the sense that arriving and departing passengers at most airports I’ve seen use completely different corridors — and, more often than not (as was the case here), never see each other.

On the long route to imigrasi, peopled mostly with those from the People’s Republic, I came across a most innovative exhibit: a collage of famous personalities from this country and the world — including our very own ‘Badshah’ (superstar), the Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan, who I’m told has a massive fan following in Indonesia! Entitled ‘Rupabuwana’, it only served to show how globalised this typically inward-looking, Indonesian-specific place (in contrast to Bali, heavily westernised) could be if it at least tried.

That said, I feel CGK T3’s domestic arrivals — as I’d seen the previous June — do it even better, between the intricate paintings (for sale!) and the slick black walls with varicoloured circular plates. That’s as authentically Indonesian as you can get in terms of terminal art, similar to Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport’s Terminal 2, firmly among my favourites in the world.

…But you can do only so much before the (human) traffic jams

Thus far, CGK had provided a, if not Changi-level, very smooth and streamlined arrival experience. So far so good, right? This is where Jakarta did a Jakarta: it turned a hitherto effortless experience into a, if not horrible, heavily delayed and entirely preventable series of cascading measures. Here we go, then…

At long last, at two p.m., the crowds gave way to the Immigration counters, with high-ceilinged kiosks to the right and automated gates straight ahead. I’d already purchased an Indonesian e-visa-on-arrival, so thought it would only be a matter of scanning my passport at the automated gates like I do at Changi — only to be told that my passport apparently wasn’t electronically readable, so that would be a no-go!

On it was then to the unending queues, where the passengers were overwhelmingly from Taipei, Guangzhou or Xiamen, and hence the chatter was exclusively in Mandarin — something I’m inured to in Singapore, though the SG accent differs markedly from the Mainland one. Meanwhile homegrown digital-economy unicorn Gojek spoke to them in their language through the ads on the overhead screens, interspersed with Samsung’s less-Chinese, more-multilingual ads for Galaxy AI.

Before long, my phone battery and lower back both started to complain, and I had to put down my heavy rucksack all while the queues showed no sign of moving forward. It was evident that the lion’s share of arrivees, all having alighted from B-registered aircraft from TPE, CAN or XMN, were woefully underequipped to deal with the immigration procedures of this distant (to them) country.

Among them was a group of (almost entirely female) EVA Air crew in their dapper dark green uniforms, and they lined up in the dedicated lane for air crew. If it wasn’t obvious enough already, this felt less like Jakarta and more like Jinan or Jiangbei — this being Chongqing’s airport (code: CKG, remarkably similar to CGK) — if not for the omnipresent Republik Indonesia official seals and Bahasa Indonesia signage.

As I waited, I appreciated how my mom was able to recognise Shah Rukh Khan from the art installation above. (‘Who can you recognise?’ I’d asked in Bengali, my mother-tongue.)

Later she asked me how long I’d take to reach the hotel, as I busied myself standing. Then she used a favourite mock-disparaging epithet of hers, calling me a ‘spinning wheel’ who keeps travelling at the expense of one’s duty. To which I replied that I needed to keep spinning: if I stop spinning or moving, I stop living!

I refused to pay heed to back, bag and baggage, instead busying myself with some posts on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum enquiring about visas on arrival at Jakarta. It’s a bit sad that, despite Western countries all welcoming them with open arms — try telling that to the lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of Indians who line up at VFS Global every year for Schengen or US visas — Aussies still have to pay for a visa to enter their northern neighbour, and more specifically the Island of the Gods, that hub of all backpackers from Down Under.

(It goes without saying that Jakarta, a city for business, will attract far fewer Aussies than Denpasar: DPS is overrun by Jetstar and Virgin Australia — even Batik Malaysia serves Sydney and Melbourne via DPS, continuing from KUL — though both Garuda and Qantas fly from CGK to both SYD and MEL.)

On another note, the then-23,000-strong Telegram group — since swelled to over 28k — of The MileLion, Singapore’s leading miles-and-points travel blog, was celebrating a victory over Team Cashback in a recent competition (Never in Doubt, it said), while I and thousands of others rued the crippling, mortally fatal death blows that HSBC Singapore dealt to its popular Revolution card, which is now all but useless.

Speaking of Indians and Schengen visas, there were a couple of articles from Indian news website Moneycontrol where travellers bemoaned the extra-long waiting time — stretching up to months and months at a stretch — to get a Schengen visa, not to mention the increased fees. As a result, more Indians turned to much more welcoming countries, with direct flights from at least Delhi and Mumbai, if not elsewhere: from little-known Central Asian wonders like Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (all now served from DEL by IndiGo) to perennial Southeast Asian favourites like Thailand and Singapore — to which we can now add Vietnam. One thing’s for sure, as far as I’m concerned: Thailand is a grossly overrated travel destination for Indians.

As I’d seen on my trip to Vietnam in December, Indian travellers are now hell-bent on turning it into the next Thailand — a big role being played by easy affordable flights from several cities, in addition to VietJetAir in particular [/b[extensively targeting Indian travellers in terms of service and cuisine. I’d rather they went to Indonesia — or, heck, even Cambodia (as I did recently) — instead of the holy trinity of Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.

At long last (at 2:45 or thereabouts) I finally managed to get my passport stamped, and went immediately to the high-ceilinged, rather Dubai-like, baggage-collection area. Indeed, when I visited DXB a month later, in mid-July 2024 for a weekend with family — having been there previously in June 2022 — I could not help but note the similarity in the high-ceilinged enclosures (something I have a kind of phobia of, as I said for Changi T3) with tall pillars. Of course the DXB baggage area is very broad and takes up the space of a big auditorium, while this one is very narrow by comparison, with all belts arranged in single file.

As often happens, all the luggage from my flight had already been offloaded from the belts, and was placed aside next to the Baggage Service counter. I picked up my luggage, went right and, one post-arrival security check later, headed outside.

This was the (again, high-ceilinged) exit lobby at CGK T3, and very idyllic-looking at that, compared to the hordes of travellers at BKK’s arrivals who are always pushing their trolleys and luggage down the flat escalators to the taxi-rank level. Another reason for me to dismiss the ugly Thai airport and praise this underrated Indonesian one…

The amenities, though, looked a bit bare-bones, compared to Indian airports like Bengaluru and Mumbai with whole rows of restaurants in the arrivals driveway, not to mention Changi’s cafés just outside the luggage belts. (More on Telkomsel in a bit…)

It was time to switch my Gojek app location to its home country, and indeed I go out of my way to use Gojek wherever possible in Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. Between the lovely,  warm illustrations, the friendly, funny language and the well-thought-out interface — not to mention (in this case) the vast array of Indonesia-specific services that Gojek can only provide in its home country — I have a strong preference for Gojek over its chief competitor, the SG-based Grab, which honestly feels like a ‘cash grab’ to me. Just look at that fun riddle that it asked when authorising my credit card for purchases!

Unfortunately, Thailand and Malaysia (as well as Cambodia, which I visited in November 2024) don’t have Gojek. I have no interest in the local alternatives — like the Russian-origin Maxim in all these, plus AirAsia MOVE (formerly airasia ride) in Malaysia and PassApp in Cambodia — so there’s no choice but to use Grab in these countries.

Now I wished for a Gojek ride to simply pick me up and whisk me away. Big, big mistake! As it turns out, I’d chosen the cheaper Instant Point instead of the Luxe pickup point, and as a result I had to stand — mind you, stand (there was no place to sit) — with heavy bag and baggage alongside the other waiting travellers, who were mostly female (many with kids, many others solo) and almost entirely local Indonesians.

Bar a brief visit to the Telkomsel GraPARI kiosk — that’s what the telco brands all its service centres — this is where I remained standing from 3:15 to 3:45. A young woman or guy in a Gojek T-shirt would call out, one after the other, a name from her or his iPad’s live-refreshing Google Sheet, and that passenger would plonk their (more often than not, her) weary rear end into the comfy seat of an air-conditioned MPV.

In most cases the car would be a Toyota Innova (seen everywhere in India) or Avanza — never heard of in India, but consistently Indonesia’s most popular car — or equivalent Daihatsu Xenia. (Indonesia is the only country where Daihatsu is so prevalent, as it’s seen as Toyota’s twin brand, with identical cars in several segments.)

At length, I did get a ride, a Toyota Calya — an indigenous Indonesian-specific MPV — but it would be 2.5 hours more before I eventually got to the serviced apartment, thanks to Jakarta’s legendary macet (traffic). And I told my parents as much, at which my father replied that Bengaluru (my parents’ current home) and Mexico City are the co-owners of that dishonour!

My mother also said, ‘There are very few people on this planet who will fly to eat. You are a foodifly!’ 😁 After which I shared more pictures from the flight, the meal and the all-around tranquil experience I’d had on what would become my only A330 of the year, and my first A330-900neo.

I’m going to spare you the details of my own ride for the time being, but it’s all there in the Tourism Bonus down below, should you wish to exhaust yourself further — if you have any energy left after reading this report, that is… (Go figure that this was the only time the traffic was this horrible during my 50-plus hours in Jakarta — every other time I could simply whoosh to and fro on those mega-expressways!)