So I am booked in to fly business class on Cathay flight CX110, departing Sydney at 0835, to arrive in HK around 1450 local time.
Get to airport no probs, but upon checkin, I am asked a blunt "Window or Aisle" by a
sour man. Our travel agent had already allocated me seat 23A (I was expecting this to be on the new 1-1-1 config A330 plane). But no, sour-man says its 2-2-2, so I ask for an Aisle seat (I think I was on a very old 2 class config A330).
There was a relatively small queue to get through immigration (though some clown has forgotten their carryon bag, and there is a small commotion until the flustered girl comes back to fetch it). I must investigate this APEC card (Thanks Simongr for mentioning it).
First stop is the refurbished Qantas Business Lounge - I really cannot tell that there had been X months work done - seems quite similar to before, except that there are these large white bars that have coffee machines on them.
Boarding was supposed to start at 0810, but is eventually delayed until around 0830 or so. When I get there, there seems to be many people, and I spy
sour man again - who quickly asks some econ passsengers to move over to fill up the priority/bus-lane as he spots a bunch of us guys coming out of the lounge to make us wait. The plane is at the furthest gate, and strangely only had 1 airbridge attached. Even after the plane is filled, takeoff was not until well after 0900 (probably around 0920) as we sat around for quite some time on the tarmac. At one stage before they shut the door, a ground crew guy ran back and forth shouting "Where's my radio?" - I can only presume there was some tech problem that wasn't sufficient enough to ground the plane.
Anyway, so Business class is packed full. Not one spare seat at all. I don't know what is going on, as in my previous experience, Cathay flights aren't usually full in business. There was no personal greeting, and I found myself seated on a very tired old plane - it was worse than all of my previous Cathay flights inside Asia (I've travelled between HK and TK/Singapore). There was not all that much legroom - I could put my feet on the back of the seat in front, and when I was working on my laptop on the table, the guy in front reclined and the seat-back bumped the lid of my laptop. The seats were not all that comfortable and I couldn't really doze off. I think the Qantas seats are spread out more? I didn't really care so much about the personal greeting, but after taking into account everything else, it seemed to me that they treated me as if I was in economy. It was worse than Qantas staff tossing the toiletries bag at you. I think I was offered a drink before take-off, but it was take what was on the tray or else.
In flight... AVOD was *not* functional, and the crappy looping programming was February's schedule, which had to be to reset at least once. I gave up trying to watch anything decent on that flight. At meal time, they ran out of something (iirc, the chinese noodles?), and really had the econ attitude - "beef or chicken" - seemed to me that this crew could have been just plain old grumpy?
When we finally got to HK, we were quite late - I'm guessing we were so packed full that we couldn't fly any faster with the fuel load?
Yes, I got there in the end. But my firm had paid a lot of money for this ticket and I didn't receive the level of service or features that was paid for and expected (in comparison to all other business class flights, this was the pits). A colleague of mine had flown up a couple of days earlier than I did, and he bought his wife a ticket in economy which was one fifth the price of my business class ticket.
Based on that flight alone, I'd never willingly book into Cathay again. I guess I need some help/suggestions on my impending
letter to Cathay about my abnormal flight.
I'll write a separate report for the return leg soon (I just got home last night). That trip was much better
Cheers.
First Trip Report : CX110 Sydney to Hong Kong
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