April 11: Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, checking out Tune Hotel LCCT

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Uneventful check-out at Tune. Got the $5 deposit back. Tune is a very good idea, a budget hotel almost adjacent to LCCT. Other choices are those at/near KLIA which would cost you several times more in money and material and facilities pampering (provision).

Many visitors have commented about Tune - convenient and has basic provision. I join them in affirming them, and also add my voice to ask Tune to improve their air-con provision. The lowest setting of 20C does not work, it's more like 25C. It might be something to do with capacity: we turned it on when we arrived in the room and it was 'cool'. But when we turned it on at about 1030pm, it was blowing air at room temperature. If you read this and plan to stay in Tune LCCT, please use a thermometer to record temperature at different time of your stay, and report back as a comment. Somebody must have gathered scientific evidence. With the air-con essentially serving in-room air around the room over the night, it was far from pleasant. You can't open the windows for reasons of security, and civility - they might comment on my body spray. In fact, when I later stayed in different hotels (in Singapore and Malaysia), setting the air-con below 20C was too cold for me to sleep - I set it to 22C. So Tune's 20C is far from right, not too cold for me, but too hot.

On the way back to LCCT, we noticed that the red shiny modern car had completed his walkway-blocking duty. It's no longer there, but parked near to it. So was the deflated wheel re-inflated? We didn't bother to check but more concerned with catching our flights.

In LCCT, we noticed how modernity has played against basic human communication. If you are in LCCT in the near future, you may notice this: in the area in front of the baggage scanning machines, i.e. on entering "R" check-in desks, is a large area where one side has several rows of seats. Just in front of these seats are 2 display monitors (TV screens) showing flight departures and their check in information. Passengers and their sending-offers are drawn to this like fish to water. However, the display monitors serve just one purpose: to show if the counter is "open" or "null". That is, either it says a certain flight check-in status is "open", or it says nothing. OK, perhaps nothing too serious here, but surely you want to know which area and desk(s) you can check in? Fish to water, information incomplete, fish see direction to water but direction does not actually say where water is. After some scratching of scales, I happened to think outside of the tank, and saw a huge - when I say huge, it means something like 5 metres across - banner immediately to the right of these TV screens. On the banner, it tells you exactly, absolutely spot-on, where to check in with respect to your destinations and flight numbers. If you only look at the monitors and ignore the banner, you would lose the plot. If you read them two in conjunction, it would make sense. Reading the banner without looking at the monitor, you should live but perhaps not well - check-in for your flight may not have opened, or had closed.

Perhaps the fact that the banner is in dark green colour, and text in white, does not help. Surely, a note at the TV screens, or underneath, would help, to point people to "look at the banner"! Perhaps it would be a strange idea - would it be odd to say on the monitors to look at a physical non-updatable banner?? Maybe another idea is to use a 3rd monitor to say the message on the banner? or swap the check-in information screen with a message of the banner? When you are at LCCT, perhaps have a look at this and see how many people wondered round the terminal wondering where to check-in, without seeing the banner. Or in fact, things have improved since we were there.

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Our flight to Singapore was delayed by 30 minutes. Sitting at the waiting area, I observed that there is an air of defeatism amongst passengers. No longer would they charamastically spur on to the gate on the first announcement of anything close to their flight number or the first audible evidence of the consonant of the destination; or for that matter, surging towards the staff to the point of full embrace with cabin luggage and boarding pass still in hand, in some cases hanging on their shoulder. No; and defeatism perhaps not, but maybe it's more civility, where orderliness, or its desire, is surely an evidence. This is characteristically the same in about 5 departures. On announcement, people started queueing up. Queueing up! Wow, this happens in KL? So far I could see (and I did see 5 departures), no one "appeared" (in the sense that I did not witness it) to misread the queue and "tuck iin" ever so gently into the front of the queue. Such a "surely no one saw me" way of queue-jumping is characteristic of KL populace, ok not all of them. I got to the baggage scanning machine first, followed by my partner, I stopped to load my baggage up. Just at the point, the guy behind my partner came straight up without hesitation nor indecisiveness and lifted his luggage up to the rollers. It was my duty, being in front of him, to show courtesy to him, behind my partner, as his luggage came off the ground before mine did. Please, if you can step on others, do it. You never know when you get over-stepped.

Another thing I noticed while in the waiting area is that the TV monitors (I will pay even more attention when I am in Malaysian airports in future) show robotic timed information, in that sense that when a certain flight should be "boarding" or have "departed", it would show that information despite the fact that the passengers are still sitting waiting, and even when no announcement had been made. The Bangkok flight was in fact delayed by about 40 minutes, as in the incoming aircraft was delayed. I made a note of tracking what would happen to the information for this flight. It stayed "departed" throughout until the flight had actually departed. Come on, surely somebody must have thought the very likely discrepancies. Is there a pattern here? The TV monitors in LCCT serve a slightly different purpose? As if to display "data" from a book, rather than giving relevant "information"? Difference between data and information there. Asians being pragmatic, nobody appeared to be bothered by the lack of pinpoint accuracy. I shan't complain neither.

In fact, I found the notion of "gate" rather interesting. The gates at the departure area are very near to each other, some less than 2 steps across. I think we should do away from "gate", probably something to do with meat market in olden days, and when airport could afford not more than a dozen aircrafts at a time and gates were spread out for some distances.

Are there still airlines that require you to confirm your flight 2 or 3 days before departure? Anyway, I find that the initial "check in" process is becoming a little redundant. Certainly we still need this particular step for passengers to confirm they are travelling, since we can't have people turning up and buying tickets there and then. Air Asia is reducing counters check-in, and people will use web check-in. This online process completes with printing of the boarding pass. I think the moment you have fully paid for your ticket, your boarding pass should be made available. Of course, some passengers may have to change their journey later, so the pass becomes invalid, and the seat becomes available for another passenger. If a system can deal with this, or an airline sorts out an improved workflow, then air travel booking might enter a new phase. With any change, we are likely to lose something and yet gain something else. Essentially, if a passemger pays to travel (and the seat), then you assume he/she will travel unless he/she chooses not to or re-schedule. So, by default, paying fully for the travel is equivalent to issueing the boarding pass, and no further things to be done till passenger does "bag drop" and security clearance at airport.

Back to our flight. Again, Air Asia could not finish serving in-flight meals when it started to land. We were still eating when the wheels touched the tarmac. The rest of the journey into our hotel in Singapore was uneventful. If you are using MRT from Singapore airport terminal 1 to downtown, you need to take the shuttle train to terminal 2. That's where the MRT departs from.

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