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As of 12:01am, 17 February 2006, the (Malaysia Airlines) MAS Travel Fair 2006 is officially under way. The MAS website is back up and running, with information now readily available and accessible. After a rather rocky start with server problems caused by overwhelming traffic, the travel fair is ready to take in public bookings, or so it seems.

In a stroke of luck, I finally managed to get into MAS Travel Fair’s website. The first thing I did was to browse the official price listings of fares and golden holiday packages to confirm that the information I had published earlier was authentic. I am glad to say that they are indeed valid and accurate.

However, my joy was short lived. I found that the promotion site was somewhat misleading in its delivery of information. While it provided adequate information about the promotional fares, Golden Holiday packages, participating travel agents, and the book-online-and-win contest, it failed to disclose one very important piece of information: Where can the public go to make their online reservations?

After scratching around their site for a bit, I finally figured out that we (the public) were to use the existing online booking facility available on MAS’s home page. The sad thing about it all is that they practically created a new section for the Travel Fair (the page pops up in a new window damnit!) but failed to link back to the online booking facility! Talk about bad accessiblity.

Anyway, I checked out the online booking facility to confirm that we could indeed get the tickets at the stipulated prices. I did so by choosing a random city of origin and destination.

Test #1: One Way Ticket
For my first test, I decided to start from Kuala Lumpur flying out to Ho Chi Minh City. I then set a random date (21 June 2006) and told the system to search for a one way direct flight with the best prices available. It returned to me several choices and flight times. Yes, the ‘L’ and ‘Q’ classes defined in the flight fare listings were available for selection. Just to confirm, I requested for the fare breakdown and confirmed that the cost of the ticket was correct (RM269.00 which tallied with the quoted price). So far so good.

Test #2: Round Trip
Next, I requested for the return tickets from the same city of origin and destination, with the same departure date and another random return date (30 June 2006). A quick submission and check of the fare breakdown revealed that the ticket prices were correct as before (e.g. double the previous cost because it was round-trip). Second test passed with flying colours. Note that the airport tax was actually slightly cheaper.

Test #3: External Country Of Origin
The final test was the reverse of Test #1. I reversed the source and destination cities but retained the departure date. I was quite surprised when the query returned me a quotation in US Dollars! Was I missing something here? I checked the fare breakdown (USD79.00 for the flight ticket) just to be sure and punched the numbers through the calculator to see if the price came out to be RM269.00 after conversion (using 3.80 as the conversion rate). It did NOT tally. Instead, I would be paying approximately RM300.00. The only way that it was going to match up was if the exchange rate was 3.40.

That means that you’ll be paying more for flight tickets purchased from another country. Or perhaps more accurately, flight tickets departing from a country other than Malaysia (round trip tickets being the exception). That does not seem right to me.

Scenario
Consider this. What if I wanted to fly out from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok, make a connecting flight to Vietnam, and return to KL by way of Ho Chi Minh City? I would obviously have to book the flights seperately (a round trip ticket means that I would have to return from Bangkok). Booking the KL - Bangkok flight wouldn’t be a problem as I would get the promotional price. But what about the Ho Chi Minh - KL flight? From the calculation made earlier, I would have to pay RM31.00 more than the listed price. And that is still subject to exchange rates and bank charges! Something was definitely wrong here.

Conclussion
While the flights out from Malaysian cities follows the listed price, booking flights departing from other cities would result in slightly inflated prices (lost in translation). I believe that this may be due to service charges and processing fees levied on overseas transactions. If you have to purchase tickets seperately with origins from a country other than Malaysia, I suggest going through one of the many participating travel agents. That way, you should be quoted in RM instead of USD and don’t have to pay the additional surcharge.

Other than this little non-glitch in the system and the bad dissemination of information, everything’s good. I managed to experiment with the system for a bit and source out some flights that I would like to book without much trouble. I did experience the occasional ‘connection denied’ like this morning but those were rare and far between. Perhaps its because I was checking out the prices at an odd hour. We’ll just have to wait and see if the system can stand the real acid test when private users begin logging in to purchase tickets and the travel agents begin their office day tomorrow.