What’s wrong with Makkasan Airport Railway Link baggage check-in service

Makkasan Airport Railway Link baggage check-in is a great idea, but they need to sort some things out first.

Last week saw the commencement of the baggage check-in service for flights on Thai Air and Bangkok Airways at the Airport Railway Link Makkasan station in Bangkok.

You can check-in to your flight, deposit your baggage and get your boarding pass at Makkasan station from between 12 and 3 hours before your flight.

In theory it’s a great idea and once they iron out the kinks and fix some shortsighted regulations it will be a great service, especially for people that have flights departing late in the afternoon and at night.

Great for late flights

More often than not, my flight out of Thailand is midnight, so I usually have to try to wrangle a late check-out, sometimes having to pay half a day’s rate, or store the bags at the bell desk after check-out, and come back hours later to pick them up and take them to the airport. Now we can just check-out at noon, take our bags and check them in at Makkasan, then go off and do our thing until we head to the airport several hours later.

Since you are already checked in to the flight, there is no need to be at the airport 3 hours before the flight, you just need to clear immigration. I would however advise not getting to the airport too late in peak season, as the line up to get through passport control can be very long (I’m talking about snaking all around the departure lobby).

There are a number of problems though stemming from an apparent lack of planning that need to be fixed before this service can reach it’s full potential.

Getting there

Subway

There is an MRT subway station located not far from the Makkasan station, however you have to drag your suitcases about 300 meters from the MRT to the Airport Link over typical Bangkok rough sidewalks and roads. From inside Makkasan station there are signs and an escalator pointing to the MRT, making you think that there is a smooth connection, however the escalator simply empties you out onto the sidewalk, from where you have to walk to 300 meters to the street.

Taxis

Getting a taxi to Makkasan station is a joke. We took a taxi there twice. One driver dropped us, and our bags off at the wrong station, insisting it was Makkasan, despite the sign by his head that stated otherwise. When he finally accepted that it wasn’t the correct station, he told us to take the train there (which is another rigmarole altogether, see below).

The other driver dropped us off near the MRT station and we had to drag our bags along the street 300 meters to the Airport Link station. It wasn’t just our driver that did this, we saw several taxis dropping off people with suitcases in the same spot.

There is a nice wide road leading up to the station, however for some inexplicable reason this has been blocked off so no cars can enter. When asked about this inside the station, the friendly staff told us that taxis can indeed come right up to the station to drop off and pick up passengers. Whether there was another entrance that none of the taxi drivers know about, or if she was under the impression that the road downstairs was open when it indeed was not, was unclear.

Train

The Airport Link has two lines, the Express Line that runs non-stop between Suvarnabhumi Airport and Makkasan station and takes 15 minutes, and the City Line, which is more like a local train and stops at a number of stations between Suvarnabhumi Airport and the final station Phaya Thai, which is two stops past Makkasan.

You can transfer between the city line and the express line at Makkasan however they make you walk quite far, although the platforms are actually quite close to each other. It seems to me that the people that designed this station, and indeed the whole network, seem to have forgotten that people traveling to the airport often have large bags.

Baggage check-in service

Check-in staff“Nobody wants to pick up that heavy bag”

This is another example of one hand having no idea what the other one is doing. Truly ridiculous!

Even though your baggage weight may be well within the weight limits of your airline and class of ticket, labor laws at the State Railway apparently prevent staff from lifting any bag heavier than 32 kilograms.

If you have status with an airline you can easily check in a bag weighing more than 32 kgs. Also, if 2 or more people are traveling, it is not uncommon to share the total weight allowance between travelers, so an overweight bag is not normally a problem if a companion’s bag weighs less then their allowance.

The woman at the check-in counter at Makkasan said, “Nobody wants to carry that bag”. We asked if we were over our allowance with Thai Air and she said that no, that was fine, it was just that it was too heavy for the railway workers to lift onto the train!

It’s ok to check it at the airport, but getting railway staff to lift it onto a conveyor belt is another story. This is really something that the airlines have to work out with the labor office at State Railway BEFORE going live.

She wanted us to redistribute the weight between the two suitcases but there was no way anything was going to fit in either one of them. Let’s be clear here- we didn’t have to reduce the weight of our luggage, just to move stuff around from one suitcase to another because one of them was too heavy for a State Railways employee to pick up.

We eventually were directed to the oversize luggage counter, only to find a four kilogram discrepancy between the weight displayed on the scales at the regular check-in counter!!

Fare

Before you check-in your bags, you are required to purchase a train fare to the airport for THB150 (about USD5) regardless of whether you intend to take the train or not. This is very important- Make sure you take the printed receipt from the vending machine after you buy your train fare token. You will need this to check-in at the counter and they won’t accept the actual token as proof of purchase (!?)

This is a bit of a pain of you were planning on say, going out for dinner and getting a massage, then grabbing a cab to the airport later, which was our original plan. The staff also seemed confused that we didn’t want to head straight to the airport on the train after checking in, even though our flight was six hours away. They kept trying to herd us into the platform, even calling us back to correct our “mistake” when we left to go back to the city.

We eventually did get out, but not without them issuing us a receipt with “re-entry” stamped on it, even though it was totally unnecessary as we hadn’t used our tokens to enter anywhere, and they were good to get into the station hours later.

The Good parts

Despite all the annoying little hiccups, once we eventually got our bags checked in and our boarding passes issued, everything did go very smoothly.

We decided to come back and try the train instead of taking a taxi and we were at the airport in 15 minutes. We didn’t have to line up at the airport to check into our flight, we just had to go through immigration. At our destination our bags came out on the conveyor belt as normal, no delays or problems there, although we were half expecting some.

Another good thing about the baggage check-in service at Makkasan Airport Railway Link was that, for the time being at least, it is highly under utilized. Either most people don’t know about it yet or are waiting because it is new, but when we checked in at 6:30 PM on a Friday, there was nobody there. We were the only people in the place so there was absolutely no waiting.

Have you used Makkasan Airport Rail Link Check-in service? If so, how was your experience? Do you plan on utilizing the service, or will you continue using taxis?

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