Garuda Indonesia Launching Strange New London To Bali Route

It’s stupid . But “this is Indonesia” the Jakarta - London was much better direct 14 hours. Now if you want to go from Jakarta it takes 27hours . Jakarta- Bali . 7hour lay over in Bali 1:30am - 8am which is awful . Then from Bali to London there’s an hour stop in Medan. Will be the last time I fly Garuda unless they bring the Jakarta- London direct back . They should at least do Jakarta- Medan - London. But that’s only on the way back .

I am surprised at the strategy of Garuda. I fly 5-8 times a year to Indonesia and often visit Bali and Jakarta as well as other cities around Indonesia. I have flown on Garuda, only when their prices have dropped to the £400-450 range as many of the other airlines price around this figure or less. I don't mind paying slightly more for a direct flight but anything more than £30-40 is pushing it as you can find 1-3 hour stopovers for a decent price. Garuda's recent pricing is way off the mark as most flights are over £750, when Chinese carriers are £370 and Malaysia / Thai with 2-3 hour stopovers for £480. I don't know how full their flights are, but at this price, I wil not be flying with them.

This airlines top management and decision makers are a bunch of unprofessional jokers, and this is pretty evident now in the way they have mishandled or mismanaged the London flights. Dont get me wrong here, the cabin crew and ground staff of Garuda are one of the best we have experienced and are the actual saving grace and saving face of this airline. We Love Indonesia and Bali in particular, so we always followed and flew Garuda Indonesia right from the time they started out Gatwick-Amsterdam-Jakarta. They then moved to Heathrow in March 2016 so we had a schedule change from a morning flight to late evening flight. We still flew with them because it was like we reached Indonesia as we stepped on the plane. Somewhere August-September 2016 they then decided to completely cancel flights on Wednesdays and Thursdays out of the precious slots they had at Heathrow thus losing them for ever. We had already booked so still flew with them again in November. (We all know Oman paid $75million for slots and every airline ar Heathrow treat their slot as high value assets, i dont think Garuda see it this way or even understand this) Come August 2017 we were notified that our flights in December may get cancelled totally and we have to reroute via Amsterdam, we agreed without having a choice, but then again a month before the flight we got a call informing Heathrow flights are on and we can fly from Heathrow if we consent. Done we accepted this again. We booked again with them to travel in November 2018 and yet again they were back to their stunts shifting us to Amsterdam or a refund of tickets saying that flights from Heathrow will shut completely, so put off we were we just gave up and ended up taking a refund100% saving us from sleepless nights and menacing uncertainty So now after hearing that they will fly to Bali directly, i dared to look at their website and fell off my bloody chair looking at the prices, suspecting a malfunction i tried to check with expedia and southall travel and as thick-skinned Garuda can be they are selling at fares of £790 for a return ticket when Singapore, Thai, Qatar and others are offering the same dates at the £560-595 range. I’m wondering why and how do they expect we will pay close to £200 extra for a direct flight that too in one direction and only on 3 days a week and after treating their passengers like a bag if trash. The British public are not fools - It is very evident and obvious that the top management dont care two hoots about British customers who choose to book and fly with them. It seems they are hell bent to shut the Heathrow flights again for this airline, i mean if they cared even one bit they would have stood up and taken note of their wrongdoings and mishandling and worked towards ensuring taking steps to make this a good and successful flight, instead from what I see they doing everything to ensure that less people fly with them so that they can yet again play this game of book, transfer passengers and cancel flights to London when the flights are not full because of such high fares. Our trust has been broken so many times by this airline that we are very certain we are NEVER EVER going to put our money on Garuda ever again.

Agree with pak Bagus. For a leisure flyer, being able to fly nonstop LHR-DPS is a win, even with the return being a 1 stop option as no other carrier offer that service. The 77W can and will go on to serve the night departures to NRT/KIX/PEK/PVG and then back to CGK to position for the flight back to LHR. What is strange is the fact that GA had seemingly given up on the premium market (which they invested heavily early on) as no biz flyer would put up with backtracking from DPS to CGK. Interesting to see if GA releases J space to partners on this route. If it does, I think it's a solid use of Delta SkyMiles miles (80k + tax)

It's not strange if you put airport runway capacity into consideration. Heathrow's runway can accommodate fully loaded Boeing 777-300ER, while Denpasar airport runway can't. There are other airlines who operates similar type of airplane, but none fly that long, so their planes will not be fully fueled. Therefore their planes doesn't took off from Bali at maximum fuel load.