OOAK Table Tennis Forum

If you're in Malaysia, you've gotten an email from Tony Fernandez - pay RM499 (about USD120) for a voucher and you get "unlimited free travel for a year (until March 2021)" to, among other places, Japan, Korea, China and Australia. I'm wondering how much of a good deal this is.. seats are limited, which means you might or might not get a free seat when you want to travel (but if you plan way ahead this is less of a problem). The main thing I worry about is that return flights might not have ANY "free seats", and you'd have to pay full fare for the return flight (this is USUALLY how Air Asia's free ticket promotions work). If so, you'd have to make two or more trips in order to make this pay, because base fare to Japan, for instance, is LESS than RM499.

As for the coronavirus - this is good for a year, so maybe a trip in the fall or early next year will be after everything has blown over...

What do you think?

Iskandar

Sounds like a scam to me!

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It's not a scam, at least, not in the usual sense of the word. AirAsia really is offering this deal:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willhorton ... c4d9503b4e

But whether it's actually worth it is another matter - if return flights aren't included, and you don't fly more than once during the year you'd break even, but you won't really gain anything. On the other hand, if you CAN get "free" seats in both directions, or if you fly three or four times, it's absolutely worth it. (And I suppose if your luck is really bad and you can't get one of the allotted seats at all, then you lose the money..)

I have to decide in the next 2-3 days. I think I'll actually go for it, since I've been wanting to visit Japan for a while now. Maybe it's an incentive to go twice - maybe to Sapporo in the height of summer (way too hot in Tokyo in August) and Tokyo in December. Visit Australia? Umm... can't think of a reason to at this time..

Iskandar

To answer my own question - I got an email reply to a query to AirAsia - yes, return flights do have "free seats" on them (a limited number, of course). So I suppose it would more than pay for itself if I got a round trip "free".

According to the Forbes article AirAsia X flights are, on average, only 80% full so that's why this makes sense. I imagine the number of travelers will plummet at least for the next couple months.

Iskandar

Sounds like a lot of risk for visiting COVID-19 infected countries. Aren't airports the prime vector for turning COVID-19 into a pandemic ?

Perhaps Japan and China are now even more open than before, but on the return flight back to origin country might already have a Travel Ban for people returning from said destinations ???

So if you really really hate your own country and want to get stuck in quarantine etc ...

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China, Italy, Korea definitely. Japan, not so much. 200+ cases, and those were from that cruise ship. Just take precautions, and this is good until next March in any case.

Iskandar