Checking in
I’m not sure if it’s the same with every airline but Malaysia Airlines require you reconfirm your flight 72 hours before hand (presumably so they can sell your seat again if you don’t). Doing this for our flight out was tricky to say the least. The windmill where we got married has mobile signal in limited areas in our room so the call involved being on hold for while trying not to get disconnected before speaking to a lady with a very thick Malaysian accent and understanding about 1/10th of what was said. Anyway, I think I confirmed the flight, and we were able to get on the plane which was the important thing.
For our internal flights I just let the hotel sort it. Wonder up to the front desk, hand them the details, 2 hours later a message on the room phone, all sorted. Job done.
For our return flights we decided to be clever and not only confirm our flights but also checkin online to get the seats we wanted. Turns out there is an app for this. What could be simpler?
App installed I entered the retired details for The Zozos ticket, booked her a seat where she wanted on the flight to KL and had the boarding pass emailed to my phone. It then allowed me to check in to the longer flight to England, only this time there was no option to pick a seat. Oh well, booked into 52A. Process finished there is then a message about would I like to check in another passenger and a note saying that for mobile checkin each passenger needed the checkin sent to a separate device. Hmmm.
So I proceed with my checkin. Book myself a seat next to The Zozo to KL, tell it to SMS the boarding pass to her phone. We’ll just have to swap phones for a bit when boarding. Next step, the flight to London. Again, not able to select a seat, but hey, the bookings were made together, they’ll know we want to sit together… 57F. Right. Sod that, let’s phone them and get them to change it so we can sit together. Ironically enough the lady in the Malasian MA office spoke better English than the one in the UK office.
Seats now sorted I was told to disregard the boarding passes on our phones and collect new ones at the airport. Incidentally the call cost about 3p from the hotel phone. In the UK it would be 100 times more.
To make the whole experience totally not worth it the flight we actually did successfully check on for and have mobile boarding passes for was cancelled, so we had to go to the checkin desk and recheckin anyway. I wonder, if when getting the hotel to do it, you can give them your seat preference and have them sort everything.