Air Astana

Unprofessional they do not honor rules of other airlines that flew me in. I get 2 x 32 kg bags and they decided they want to take money and said u should have read our rules.
They charged me 300$ for excess 22 kg’s! I would buy a full bag of 32 kg for 75$ from USA!!!

And nit just that they said this money is only to Amsterdam and made my bags need checked out and back in again in Amsterdam ( jeopardizing my flight to USA).

They say You Are in AirAstana only our rules apply!!!

Will try my utmost to avoid this airline.

I have taken the flights with Air Astana just recently between Beijing, Astana, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Almaty and back to Beijing and was pleasantly surprised how well, professionally and smooth everything was organized.

Today my 22 weeks of pregnant wife couldn’t fly to Bangkok via an Almaty transfer because of a series of inexplicable services at Astana Airport. Officers wanted to see the official medical documentation for pregnancy which had to prove my wife could fly on the date indicated in her ticket and confirming the pregnancy period. We showed the approval document from hospital exactly showing what they asked for. But Air Astana asked for another document in addition. We showed the Air Astana English website that our document had what website wanted us to prove, then they had internal phone calls which took more than 30 minutes, we waited all this time. Finally they didn’t let us to board. We lost our ticket although we presented the necessary information and we showed up on time. We explained that we followed the instructions obviously written Air Astana website in English to two duty officers and many other officers, but they couldn’t explain what they had to see in the other additional document they asked for. My wife flied with Air Arabia from Astana to Sharjah with same way of paperwork 2 weeks ago. Air Astana’s consecutive failures went on and we lost vacation bookings in Bangkok.

One of the best airlines that I’ve ever used

Flight numbers and destination KC345 TSE-UKK KC346 UKK-TSE

I take this flight roughly every three months, Astana to Ust-Kamenogorsk and return.

Generally the aircraft type is an Embraer 190, although I have flown on A320s occasionally due to an inability to fly because of extreme weather conditions at Ust-Kamenogorsk in December – January (-45C temperatures) and limited horizontal ground level visibility. This causes a back-up of passengers at Astana and a larger aircraft is used to clear the backlog.

Very high level of skill landing in this extreme weather at Ust-Kamenogorsk, very impressive and smooth.

Technically, I cannot fault all flights I have taken with Air Astana, but there are some strange laws regarding online check-in.

People over the age of 60 are not allowed to check in online, because of the and I quote, “the high incidence of fraud amongst over 60 year olds …”

The only other complaint I have is that you should not count on receiving the seat that you selected at booking. This is not even indicative of where you will be seated even if you are a frequent flyer member.

The only sure fire way I have found to receive a reasonable seat allocated is to have either a native Kazakh or Russian speaking national to accompany you at the check-in counter and they will argue the toss with the check-in bureaucrat.

So for the above two reasons (lack of on-line check-in and bizarre seat allocation system) I will rate the trip satisfaction overall as 5-Fair.