Peach air review

[Peach Air Review]

Photo Credit: http://xfw-spotter.blogspot.hk/ 

This is just a review of my experience with Peach Air. Overall I'd say you get what you pay for, and I don't think I'll fly peach air again.

Peach air is a new Japanese budget airline that was established just 3 years ago in 2011. They have flights between Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

Price: $4,000 HKD round trip from Hong Kong – Kansai International.

They have only 2 flights per day on this route.

Part 1 – In flight experience

1. Staff: the staff was really nice and polite, but their English was pretty poor. If you don’t speak Japanese there would be a problem communicating complex questions.
2. Seats: I chose window seats so they were nice and spacious. However, you cannot put the seats back at all!
3. Food: there isn’t a meal that comes with a flight. You can order from their menu which consist of Japanese food and drinks, payment can be made in Japanese Yen cash, flight origin currency (change will be in yen), or credit card (with orders more than ¥1,000). But all the hot food runs out after the first 3 row of passengers order. Every else left was bread, salad, or other cold food, which is really not ideal if you didn’t eat prior to the flight.

Part 2 – Ground Experience

1. Terminal at KIX – Peach air uses the new Terminal 2 at Kansai International airport. It looks like a temporary building made out of metal scraps. Wi-fi is so weak it’s basically not functional. A shuttle is required between Main Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. After late night (around 11pm) the shuttle only runs once per hour.
2. Check in counter – Again, staff doesn’t really speak English, which is a major problem when you have complicated questions about your flight. The check-in counter is closed by 9pm, and there is no one to answer your questions after that, when other major airlines in Terminal 1 still have counters opened. They are also super anal about carry on items, you can only have 1 small carry on and 1 personal bag, i.e. if you have another shopping bag, even if it’s small, they will force you to check in your small carry on luggage.
3. Customer service - Our return flight was scheduled for 9pm on the 18^th (Friday). Due to a typhoon passing by Hong Kong, our plane was stuck in Hong Kong, so the flight was delayed until 5am on the 19^th. When you went up to the counter, they gave us 3 options:
• Wait until 5am, but the flight isn’t guaranteed to come back (they couldn’t tell us if we were guaranteed a seat or not. If the flight doesn’t come back at 5am, it would push back the next flight at 9am, which means there will be 2 crowds of passengers waiting to board, which means our seats aren’t guaranteed even if we bought tickets)
• Book the next available peach flight, which is not until 3 days later on the Monday, which is ridiculous. The reason is that a lot of other people switched their flights already.
• Refund your tickets, and catch another flight with another airline. When asked what other airlines fly to Hong Kong the next day, all they said was “we don’t know, please ask the information desk”. Are you serious? Even if you can’t book it for us because Peach isn’t part of any airline alliance (which sucks already), couldn’t you check with your computer at least? Surely you have internet.

Because there was a lot of risk involved if we wait till 5am for the flight, we decided to not refund anything, go to terminal 1 first to ensure we have a return flight with another airline, and then come back to Peach to refund our flight. When we finished all of that at 9pm and went back to Terminal 2, the Peach counter was closed, even though there were still flights arriving from the domestic line.

And at the end, it turned out that the flight that was supposed to return from HK to Kansai International at 5am didn't even return until 2pm in the afternoon. But all the other flights flying from Kansai International and HK in the morning were not delayed and left on time. I really don't know what the issue with Peach Air is.