Category: Updates

Hong Kong Airlines Ends Subpar Auckland Service

~ Alvin ~ Leave a comment

Hong Kong Airlines has long been investing in their hard product, and they’ve been getting better and better. I had the chance to fly them around Easter last year, and thought they were solid, if not fantastic. Hong Kong Airlines has also been expanding rather nicely over the past couple of years, and now flies to destinations on the West Coast such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Rumour is that they’ll start flying to New York soon, which I’d really look forward to.

Hong Kong Airlines Airbus A330 Business Class Cabin

While most of Hong Kong Airlines’ routes afford a quite comfortable product, there’s one route that features a product that has, unfortunately, fallen behind the times. Hong Kong Airlines currently runs one of their oldest planes to Auckland, New Zealand, and they had no plans to upgrade their product on the route, which made me quite curious.

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The New Turkish Airlines Lounge In Bangkok

~ Alvin ~ Leave a comment

Thai Airways has a massive hub in Bangkok, and their ground services are definitely unique. They have an amazing spa service which they offer to first and business class passengers flying on their metal, which I took advantage of flying yesterday. Unfortunately, apart from that, their ground services are rather dismal — they have 6 lounges for business class passengers, none of which are particularly impressive.

If you’re flying a Star Alliance airline out of Bangkok in business class (other than Thai Airways, or if you’re not looking for a massage), I’d actually suggest you use the EVA Air lounge instead, which has better seating, better showers, and a more appealing food spread.

That’s why I was particularly excited when I stumbled upon a Turkish Airlines lounge when I was walking around Bangkok Airport. I didn’t know they had a lounge in Bangkok, so I was curious to check it out.

Turkish Airlines Lounge Bangkok Airport

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What Is Thai Airways’ 777 Business Class Like? (Hint: I Wasn’t Expecting It To Be So Bad)

~ Alvin ~ Leave a comment

Hello from Bangkok! I’m here for a quick getaway after lots of senior year work. While I’m certainly not off the hook (my to-do list has its own to-do list), I always enjoy when I manage to be productive abroad, so I’ll work on that over the next few nights.

On the aviation front, we didn’t really have much of a choice of airline. Emirates was pricing over the roof, and I didn’t like the timings of all the other airlines that flew to Bangkok – so we were stuck with Thai Airways and Cathay Pacific again. Out of a split decision I decided to go with Thai Airways, as it didn’t cross my mind at the time that I haven’t flown Cathay Pacific’s regional business class product in a while. Oh well.

While I’ve flown Thai Airways countless times before, this itinerary left me with a new product – their 777. I’ve flown their angled flat seat more times than I can remember, though I’ve never tried their new staggered seat, until today. So I thought I’d share my first impressions, as I usually do when I fly new configurations (also, due to my workload, the review’s probably not coming out for a while).

Thai Airways Boeing 777 Hong Kong Airport

While the seat itself was an improvement over their angled flat seats, I left the flight quite underwhelmed by the product as a whole. Here’s why.

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Introduction: 5 Stars ForEVA

~ Alvin ~ Leave a comment

Introduction: 5 Stars ForEVA
Singapore Airlines SilverKris Lounge Hong Kong Airport
EVA Air A330 Business Class Hong Kong to Taipei
EVA Air The Infinity Lounge Taipei Airport
Singapore Airlines SilverKris Lounge Taipei Airport
EVA Air 787 Business Class Taipei to Hong Kong

Yeah, I get it, punny title, har har, jokes, it’s lame. Moving on…

Over the past years I’ve had the opportunity to fly Singapore Airlines partners countless times. I’ve flown the airline, I’ve flown a bunch of Star Alliance carriers to/from Europe, and I’ve also flown Virgin Atlantic, a Singapore Airlines partner, countless times. Over the years I managed to rack up 60,000 KrisFlyer miles, which is pretty impressive, considering I haven’t transferred any points over, I didn’t have an account until 2016, I don’t have a Singapore Airlines credit card (or any credit card), etc..

I realised there’d be a period of time where I’d be on the ground, but relatively freer. I figured I’d do a power trip using my miles, so I started looking at options. Ultimately I decided to head over to Taipei so I could test out EVA’s 787 product, which I was intrigued in.

EVA Air Boeing 787 Business Class

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Cathay Pacific Honors New Years Mistake Fare

~ Alvin ~ Leave a comment

Happy new year! How did you spend your new years? I spent mine counting down with a friend, getting home at 12:30 AM, and getting knocked out until 10 AM the next morning – the perfect night, if you ask me. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the guys at Cathay Pacific didn’t have as sweet a night as I did.

Cathay Pacific ran a mistake fare sale a couple of days ago when flights from Vietnam to the U.S. ran for ~HK$5,290 in business class and ~HK$8,000 in first class. Obviously, they probably left out a 0 or something, since a typical Cathay Pacific ticket can barely take you to Hong Kong from Vietnam for that price in a premium cabin.

IMG_0580Cathay Pacific Airbus A350 Business Class Cabin

The fare itself was gone when I woke up, so I couldn’t do any useful reporting on it. Instead I’m just a speculator at this point, and will talk about how I think Cathay Pacific handled this fare.

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I Flew Cathay Pacific’s New Narrower Economy Seat…and Hated It

~ Jason ~ 2 Comments

TL/DR: Although I can’t blame Cathay Pacific for their new 10-abreast Economy seats, I had an awful experience, and I will be avoiding them like I do with all my school deadlines.

Hello from Hong Kong! I just came back from a short trip to Tokyo and had a fantastic time. This trip was especially noteworthy since it was my very first time flying on Cathay Pacific’s newly retrofitted regional Boeing 777-300 aircraft. In a bid to drive up profits, Cathay has begun rapidly retrofitting it’s Boeing 777 fleet with new “densified” Economy cabins, which squeeze in an extra seat per row. I wanted to book this flight to experience the new cabins myself to see if Cathay delivered on their promise to “ease the pain” of the reduced seat width in the new seats.

img_5635Cathay Pacific Boeing 777 Hong Kong Airport

So, I finally flew the flight last Wednesday – and yeah, the experience wasn’t the best. Here are my first impressions:

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Cathay Pacific Promises Inflight WiFi On All Longhaul Flights By End 2019

~ Alvin ~ Leave a comment

Every now and then we see airlines give ambitious plans that they don’t manage to follow through with. You know Qatar Airways’ beautiful QSuite? That was supposed to be rolled out by 2015, but didn’t make an appearance until 2017 (expect a review of that mid-year, by the way). Remember Cathay Pacific’s first A350? That was supposed to come out in January 2016, but it made its inaugural flight in June.

One of the pet peeves I’ve always had when flying Cathay Pacific is the almost-universal lack of WiFi. I wrote about this at the beginning of the year, as I was irritated by the fact that none of Cathay Pacific’s longest flights featured WiFi. While this is ultimately a first-world problem, inflight WiFi makes the inflight experience much smoother for those traveling on business.

Cathay Pacific’s flights to New York are 16 hours long, and run by 777s; albeit comfortable, these planes don’t feature WiFi

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RANKED: The Best Business Class Seats In 2018

~ Alvin ~ 2 Comments

As I’m incredibly busy over the next few days and am also doing some spring cleaning with the blog and my YouTube channel, I’d like to re-post some of the guides I’ve written for your viewing pleasure, as well as post some new ones that I’ve had lined up. I’ll be back next week with some new aviation content, but for now, enjoy!

Over the course of the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to sample every single “generic” business class configurations there is out there. By “generic”, I’m talking about business class configurations that a number of airlines operate. I’m effectively ruling out specific custom-made configurations, such as Qatar Airways’ QSuites, Delta’s Delta One Suites, British Airways’ weird forwards-backwards configuration, etc.. I plan to try those out soon, though for now I thought it would be fun to visit a quick ranking of all the business class seats we’ve flown here at YTHK so far.

(For the record, based on reviews alone I’d predict that QSuites and Delta One Suites are both ahead of the competition compared to all of the products listed below. Here’s to hoping I can prove that sometime soon.)

While economy class is all about the price these days, there is lots of competition for the best business class seat out there

I figured I’d start from the worst and move on up. So here we go:

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K-Pop Fans Mob A 747-8 To Get Wanna One Autographs, Delay Flight By An Hour

~ Alvin ~ 1 Comment

Korea culture has its fair share of attention in Hong Kong – our city singlehandedly has such a large part of the entire genre’s fanbase that Mnet’s annual K-Pop awards have been hosted in Hong Kong for the past four years. I don’t listen to K-Pop (unless I’m jamming to it as part of a band), but I sure do notice the extent of our fanbase. I figured I’d share an aviation-related example, which I found rather ridiculous, but isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things (well, unless someone missed their connection).

On Saturday, boy band Wanna One flew home on Korean Air after performing for the Mnet awards. A few fans managed to track down their inbound flight, and booked refundable tickets in first class, business class, as well as economy.

Korean Air Boeing 747-8 Hong Kong Airport

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A Great Way To Spend Your KrisFlyer Miles

~ Alvin ~ 1 Comment

Last week I booked an itinerary for myself that gave me a direct turn to Taipei for 40,000 KrisFlyer miles. Now, I know that that’s not a good deal, but it seemed like a good chance to try the EVA 787. After reevaluating I decided I was an idiot, and I probably should’ve flown Singapore Airlines to Singapore as a direct turn, so I’d be getting more value for each mile I was spending. Turns out it gets worse. 😉

You can fly from Hong Kong to Perth for 65,000 miles, and on the way you’d get to try out Singapore Airlines’ 787 business class, new A380 business class, and old 777 business class with reasonable layovers each way.

Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 Hong Kong Airport

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