Bartering in Jakarta

Missing a flight in a foreign country can prove to be quite an adventure, as we found out in Jakarta this past trip.

On our way to our final destination in Indonesia, we got a little culture lesson on how the airlines work.

Our connecting time was three hours…no problem, right?  Well, we soon discovered that it was definitely not enough time.

When we landed in Jakarta, we had to pay for our visas, clear immigration, go through customs, pick up our luggage, exchange money, transfer terminals, and check in for a domestic connecting flight.  Sounds fairly straightforward, right?

We soon discovered how not straightforward it was.

Getting our visas and clearing immigration were pretty easy. We were asked why we were there.  “Teaching,” I said.  Be vague, only supply the minimum information.  “Teaching what?” he asked. “Psychology,” I said. “Ok,” and he stamped our passports.

Whew, I was a little nervous, but no problems there.

Next, we went to wait for our bags.  Now, we had been on a huge airplane.  The bags were coming, but they just kept coming, and coming, and coming.  Ours were last.  There were barely any people waiting when ours finally arrived.

We cleared customs, then began the *wildcard* piece of the transfer.  You see, we didn’t actually have our tickets for the domestic flight.  The travel agent was going to meet us in Jakarta and give us the paper tickets and help us transfer.

So we walked outside to throngs of people holding signs with hotel names and people names.  Everyone was holding a sign or waiting for friends or family.  But there was no sign that would identify us.  We searched one side of the arrival area, and figured we’d wait a minute before searching the other side.

We decided to go ahead and exchange our money, because we had to at some point, we wanted to give the travel agent more time to get there, and we were dying of thirst and in need of the local currency, rupiahs.

Finally, we began looking for the travel agent on the other side, but with no luck.  We stopped at one point and sent out a scout to go back and look for the travel agent again. But again, no luck.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out what we should do.  I was worried about our time and knew we needed to transfer terminals on a public bus, which would take a while. Maybe the agent was at the entrance to the other terminal.  Should we call someone?  I didn’t feel inclined to pay international phone calling fees, but I turned on my phone.

New text: “The travel agent called and won’t be able to meet you.  Go to the terminal, here’s your record locator: XXXXXX.”  Great.  At least we knew, but the time was short.

We asked a man, “How do we get to the domestic terminal?” “What time is your flight?” he responded.  “In an hour,” I said.  “Oh, you’ll never make it,” he informed us. Great.  Well, we’ve got to try.

Forty-five minutes later, we finally arrived at our terminal.

The ticket agent printed our tickets and sent us in.  But when we tried to check in, they all looked at us funny, sent us to line 27, where a large group of agents were all trying to solve the same problem, without success. They clearly were not able to help us.  We went to another counter and they said we couldn’t board and needed to go to the ticket counter. Great.  We had just come from there.

At the ticket counter, after about 30 minutes of waiting, a man and his supervisor came over to tell us that, because we were no-shows for our flight (not exactly true), they could only honor 10% of the original price, and then we’d have to buy new tickets at extremely inflated prices, due to the short notice.  There were no exchanges for the tickets. 1,500,000 rupiah per person ($180 each) they wanted.

This didn’t feel right.  Seriously?  I felt like maybe we should get a local advocate on our side, so we called, first, the travel agent—no answer, yeah, thanks for all your help…—and, second, our friend from last year who was picking us up at our destination.

He got on the phone with them and finally talked them down to 1,000,000 rupiah/person ($110 each).  Then he got back on the phone with them, and they only wanted 600,000 rupiah ($70 each).  “Can you pay that? What are you going to do?”  Well, I didn’t see that we had much of a choice, and he had gotten the price down significantly.

Glad to know that we were negotiating, I then asked them, “Can’t we do 500,000 rupiah ($60 each)?”  Finally, they said okay.  I didn’t know you could barter for airline tickets. 

Finally we were set, but still had to wait around on the next flight.  They wouldn’t even give us our tickets until an hour before the flight.  The airline supervisor walked us through the airport tax station, then asked for the money.  “I’d like a receipt,” I said.  “Oh, we can only give a receipt if you pay the full 1,500,000 rupiah.”  So shady…

I think we got taken a little in the Jakarta airport.  I can only imagine if we’d not called our friend and had had to pay full price.  The whole thing was a little sour, but also a great test of patience and a new cultural learning experience.

“Welcome to Jakarta,” the sign says.  That’s the truth.  “You’ve entered a new world with new ways of doing things,” the sign might have said…or, “Consider yourself forewarned…”

What have been some local customs you’ve encountered while traveling that are quite different from your home country?

Other posts in the Indonesia series: Returning to Indonesia and A Cloud of Prayer to Cover Us