Air Asia Promotion - Thoughts

Air Asia does weekly promotions and when I received the notification that showed they are having one where the travel period is between Sept - Nov, I was psyched. Ping2 and I have been hoping for a trip to Taipei (yes, to visit Lobster and maybe to hike! Serious "mountain head" syndrome..), and we are waiting to see how much it would cost.

On here it shows it's RM379.00 KUL-TPE, one way, excluding taxes and fees. This is RM80.00 more expensive than last year's promotion for travel in July & Aug, KUL-TPE one way.
The thing about Air Asia is, the advertised "lowest fare" is elusive and unpredictable. To find it, one must be crazy and take a systematic approach.

- Search results on Mon, June 6 2011.

So I spent 20 mins recording the daily fares from KUL-TPE and TPE-KUL. Since there's only one flight daily, it makes it quite easy. Those highlighted in yellow are the, what I dubbed, "Easter Egg" fare - RM304, even lower than the advertised "lowest fare". Those in pink are the advertised lowest fare, and RM8 less (must be a typo on the promotion page).

From this we can see: (Travel period 6 Sept - 16 Nov)
KUL-TPE - Easter egg fare: 3 out of 72 days (4.17%), Pink fare: 11 out of 72 days (15.28%)
TPE-KUL - Easter egg fare: 7 out of 72 days (11.11%), Pink fare: 11 out of 72 days (15.28%)
To get the lowest possible fare, one has to comb through the entire travel period and act fast.

My gripe with Air Asia is -
1. The search is very user-unfriendly, there is no option to show "+/- 3 days" so you have to repeatedly click on "Next/Previous day" or manually select the date you want to see the fares. They did, however, recently made some improvement where the results would show the fare for 3 consecutive days.
2. Another change they made is, they moved the taxes and fuel surcharge on the right column where it automatically shows and calculates the total airfare, to the next page. Now you have to first select your flight, check the box to agree to the T&C and click on "Continue" to see the total amount.
3. There is no "Back" button for you to go back and modify your travel dates.

So for our trip in question, based on my search results our lowest possible fare is:
(Nov 8 KUL-TPE) RM371 +
(Nov 14 TPE-KUL) RM304 +
(Taxes & fees, return) RM195
= RM870
We still have a PEN-KUL-PEN journey to include so a rough estimate is RM100, which brings the total to RM970, almost RM1000 for a return trip to Taipei.
A search on other non-budget airlines sites showed the lowest fare to Taipei in the same travel period is RM1290 on China Air.

A comparison:
Air Asia fare for Aug 2010 travel, PEN-TPE: RM634 (bought in June 2010)
Air Asia fare for Nov 2011 travel, PEN-TPE: RM970 (estimate, buying in June 2011)
China Air fare for Nov 2011 travel, PEN-TPE: RM1290

Air Asia doesn't feel budget anymore...