Garuda Indonesia review by Bill Barnes

A little over 1 wk before our flight, Garuda cancelled our direct 6 hour flight from Tokyo to Manado and moved us on a 19 hr indirect flight via Jakarta that arrived 1 day late and had a connection that departed at 2:00am This trip to Indonesia was the middle section of a larger anniversary trip starting in Tokyo and ending in Taiwan. The change meant we were giving up 1 day of our vacation in order to spend in at the Jakarta airport. With little time to decide, we chose to leave Tokyo early to preserve our time at Lembeh dive resort. With only 4 seats left on the day earlier flight to Jakarta we requested our flight to be changed. While on the phone, the Garuda agent implied that the only connecting flight from Jakarta to Manado was the 2:00am departure and booked us on this flight. We later discovered that Garuda has a flight that left at 9:40am. When we called back to move this connecting flight we were told that we were only allowed 1 change to our flight due to their cancellation and we had already made that change. Obviously not happy about being screwed twice, I asked about the cost to change just this connecting flight and was told that it would be $1000. 20% more than the cost of our original full flight and twice as much as it would cost to simply buy a new ticket of the flight from Jakarta to Manado. The explanation for this ridiculous amount was that they would also need to change the ticket class on the flight from Tokyo to Jakarta. This change in ticket class would not provide me with a better seat, free baggage, better meal, ... nothing. Just a different ticket class because I was making this change to close to the departure date. Given that this began with their change to my plans, then through the less than helpful hands of their customer service personnel on the phone, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised with their complete unwillingness to attempt to make the situation better and just quote "policy" I will never put my vacation plans in the hands of this airline again and I highly recommend you don't either!