Air Asia extras

Have signed up on their website, partly to see what it was like.

I can pick a normal seat, i.e. reserved seating, for 70 THB which is about £1.40. (I do wonder if they will hit me with an extra £1-2 card surcharge, as they did for the booking via expedia, even with a debit card.) It is vaguely tempting to do that for such a small amount, but on the other hand it is a shortish flight and I do perhaps need to relax about this damn aisle seat business.

20kg of checked baggage allowance is 500 THB which is about £10. I really don't want to check my bag if I can help it (ultra paranoia flying into Singapore anyway, I'd rather keep my eye on the thing continuously :-) ) and given it's THB 1110 or about £22 if I have to pay at the airline counter and I might well be able to get my weight down to 7kg anyway I am disinclined to pay this.

You can also add an in-flight meal for THB 120 or about £2.40. While airline food tends not to be great or massively substantial, that price perhaps doesn't compare too badly to what I'd pay for food in Singapore or even Bangkok and it is vaguely tempting to add that on. (You can see the available options and they all look edible.) I mean, I wouldn't pay £10 or perhaps even £5 for a typical in-flight meal on a short haul flight, but £2.40 actually seems fairly non-gouging and just like a genuinely OK add-on where you can save a little bit of money if you don't want it. In this respect, just how budget air travel should work.

I am wondering if the expedia-quoted price was deliberately inflated to allow for me to add on stuff like the checked baggage; the £20-odd it costs is suspiciously approximately the same as the difference between what I expected to pay and what I apparently have paid. (I just checked on my online statement and none of the recent stuff is showing up yet.) This seems a bit unlikely somehow. Maybe I will be stung for £20-odd of taxes at the airport, but that has never happened to me before, it's always been rolled into the ticket price and there is nothing saying you will need to pay at the airport.

I guess there's no rush for any of this; only the seats could "disappear" if I wait, and there are loads of unreserved seats yet, plus as I say I am inclined to chance it. I think I will mull over this and perhaps see how much my bag weighs when I've packed it before revisiting this. (If there is a chance of beig stuck for a card surcharge when booking any extras, I want to make sure I book them all together so I only pay it once more.)