Valuair

On my trip to Jakarta this month, I had the chance (again) to try Valuair, one of Singapore’s budget airlines. Valuair previously positioned themselves as a semi-budget airline, providing value-added services normally not given by full no-frills budget airlines such as snacks on board and assigned seats. This caused their tickets to be slightly more expensive than any other budget airlines such as Air Asia or Tiger Airways, although it’s still cheaper than full-service airlines such as Singapore Airlines or Garuda Indonesian Airways. Its business concept is similar to Indonesian Lion Air’s and Adam Air’s.

Unfortunately, such concept was not working well. They almost went bankrupt before they were being acquired by JetStarAsia, another Singapore-based budget airline which is a subsidiary of Qantas, Australia’s main airline. Even though Valuair is now acquired and managed by JetstarAsia, however Valuair still retains its logo and flight code.

Similar to AirAsia, Valuair uses ticketless system. Purchase of its flight tickets can be done over the Internet, at their website: http://www.valuair.com.sg/, or you can also visit its parent company’s website: http://www.jetstarasia.com/. Payment is made online using credit card, and a printable ticket will be sent through e-mail on PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. We just then need to show the printed ticket during check-in, together with our passports. Very efficient.

Valuair’s service is quite good, and two things which make its service is slightly better than AirAsia are (1) assigned seats during check-in; and (2) snack, water and coffee/tea which are provided on-board, free of charge. As for the rest, its service is comparable to AirAsia’s. The food provided on sale is also generally more expensive than AirAsia’s. My flight at that time was on-time, taking-off from Singapore’s Changi airport at 8:40am sharp and reaching Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta airport at 9:15am local time, 5 minutes ahead of schedule.

[Indonesian version]