Delayed In Paradise: JQ44 Bali – Melbourne

After a very good night’s sleep at the adjoining Novotel Bali Airport Hotel, I was enjoying a leisurely breakfast when I thought myself “Hey, maybe I should check my flight status” before deciding on what time to head to the terminal.

It was 9am then when the website was showing the flight has been delayed from the original 1250 to 1320.

An hour later whilst I was lazing by the pool, I looked up the website again. It has been further delayed to 1440.

That changed an hour later to 1640 before finally it settled at 1710.

There were no notification from Jetstar whatsoever until 1055 local time when I received a text message and email notifying me of the delay. I would have been very angry if I had turned up at the airport at 0950 for the originally scheduled 1250 flight!

I looked up Jetstar’s compensation policy and was saw that the airline would offer meal vouchers for delays over 3 hours and that got me thinking. If I had arrived at the airport at 0950 this morning (3 hours in advance of my original departure time) and it wasn’t until 1055 that the flight was officially going to be delayed for more than 3 hours, I would have had to wait for over an hour before receiving any refreshment, and would have had to wait for nearly 7 hours at the airport! Would they have given out more vouchers to those who had arrived earlier? I doubt.

Anyway, I turned up at the airport at 3pm, checked in at the Business Class desk and was in the lounge a few minutes’ later.

Oh, I didn’t let the meal voucher go to waste – I bought myself some packaged snacks to home with me! The voucher was worth 150,000IDR (approx AUD$15/USD$10).

By the way, Bali Airport has some pretty cool lifts. I have never been on these step-on lifts that were probably put in place during Covid.

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Kolin
Kolin
K̶Colin sleep travels poorly. He can't seem to find a hotel bed that shares the unique olfactory charm of his own.