We couldn’t help not think of associations upon hearing the name JauhDekat.com. In Indonesian, ‘jauh’ means far, ‘dekat’ means close or near. It’s a term with multiple associations, from a long distance relationship, a term used in most Indonesia’s public transportation where you pay the same amount of money no matter how far or close your trips are, or, as was the idea for Jauh Dekat, reconciling two people by making them geographically closer with flying between places. Aaaww.. isn’t that sweet? The real deal is that this is a website for ticket booking in Indonesia.

For our recent trip to Balikpapan, we booked our tickets through the website. It was our first experience using it and an easy peasy one. Through years of experience on various online ticket booking in Indonesia , I can see that Jauh Dekat has a few advantages compared to others. And this morning my Dad just asked me to book tickets for his trip to Padang, surely I’m searching for tickets on this site again.

Here are the highlights of my experience on using JauhDekat.Com to search for plane tickets:

• Love at the first sight. I prejudge a book by its cover, I can’t deny that, I’m visual that way. To me, the Home page of JauhDekat.com is designed well, with a high readability (I really like the fonts they’re using!), attractive colors with tidy collection of just a few elements. It directly draws your attention to the search box, as a ticket search website should.

• Determine your destination and schedule first, worry about the number of pax later. The search box doesn’t ask you how many passengers are going. You just need to fill in the destinations, dates, and whether it’s a return trip or a one-way-ticket getaway thing. I truly love this because sometimes I just need to know the prices first, comparing between airlines. And most of the time, I buy tickets just for myself anyway.

• The ‘Tukar Bandara” (Switch Airport) is a great feature! Easily click the button to switch the route, you don’t need to input all over again just because you did it backwards the first time. This would come handy when I can’t yet decide to take the plane for leaving or coming home ‘cos sometimes I like to try other kinds of transportations to get to somewhere.

• How many seats left? The answer is just below the ticket price on the “Hasil Pencarian” (Result) page. How many times have you missed the last discount ticket because you didn’t purchase it right away thinking that there will be still many left? Exactly, this feature in Jauh Dekat is cleverly designed to avoid that mistake again. If you see no number of tickets, then it means there’s still many left, you can do your thinking for a little more time.

• They provide international tickets as well as domestic. Jauh Dekat has been around since 2008, so they’ve settled business networks with a lot of airlines. To name a few: Garuda Indonesia, Sriwijaya Air, Kalstar Aviation, Air Asia, Lufthansa, China Southern Airlines, Etihad Airways, etc. Yup, both domestic and international routes, with at least one of the airports being in Indonesia.

• When filling in the data, make sure you fill in your active contact number. Just in case of anything, like changes of schedule or flight cancellation, the airline will let you know directly, not depending on a middleman. I like this, since I have a bad experience where my ticket agent did not inform me on a canceled flight and I had to deal with it at the check-in counter!

• Payment method on Jauh Dekat can be done via bank transfer, mobile banking, Internet banking, or credit card. If you choose bank transfer, there’ll be an attachment of payment step-by-step instructions that comes with their itinerary confirmation e-mail.

What to Expect in the Future from Jauh Dekat

As a service that was initially focused on B2B bookings, Jauh Dekat has been more popular to travel agents and companies than to personal customers like you and me. They’re now expanding the service to B2C bookings, seeing that travelers are getting more independent. As for hotel booking, they’re still developing the feature for personal customers, hopefully it will be ready soon.

For now, the website is still in Indonesian Language only. But they’re looking to provide English mode in the future.

Psst… they’ve also won a few awards, like the link here.

If you have any comment or question on JauhDekat.Com or online ticket booking in Indonesia in general, please drop a line or two in the Comment section below.

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