bagold
Jun 27, 01, 12:49 am
My girlfriend and I took a two-week vacation to Hong Kong and Thailand on a CX first class award ticket. The original intention of the trip was to attend my friend’s wedding in Hong Kong but I extended it to include a trip to Thailand. Originally, I had booked my ticket using BA miles and my girlfriend’s ticket using AA miles. After a lot of date and schedules changes, I returned my ticket to BA to redeposit the miles (no charge for Gold members) and issued an AA ticket as well. The plus side was that the AA ticket would take me from BOS to the CX gateway on the same award ticket. The BA ticket would not take me to a CX gateway so I had to buy a separate ticket to the CX gateway. In addition, when I had one ticket issued by BA and one by CX and I tried changing dates, I had to ask one of the airlines (BA or AA) to check whether there was an additional CX seat available and then immediately call the other airline to get the other seat. It turned out to be a real pain after a while. Our dates changed so many times but luckily with award tickets there was no charge for date changes. All I had to do was have the ticket revalidated. I didn’t take any notes during the trip or copies of the menus so I will try my best to remember everything.
Here was the itinerary:
BOS-DFW (AA First)
DFW-YVR (AA Economy)
YVR-HKG (CX First)
HKG-BKK (CX Business)
BKK-HKT (TG Business)
HKT-BKK (TG Business)
BKK-HKG (CX Business)
HKG-YVR (CX First)
YVR-DFW (AA Business)
DFW-BOS (AA First)
June 8th AA1079 BOS-DFW 1448-1812 (757 F Seat: 2E)
I checked-in at the Terminal B counter with my bag tagged to DFW. My girlfriend lives in DFW, hence, my trip to DFW to meet up with her before flying off to YVR. Technically, this was only a stop-over but since the next flight from DFW-YVR wasn’t until the next morning, I was allowed to overnight in DFW. After checking-in at the counter, I proceeded to the Admirals Club and presented my BA Gold card. The person working at the desk said that I was entitled to use the flagship lounge and actually took me to the lounge and introduced me to the person working in the flagship lounge. The flagship lounge is located at the back right side of the AC with a door marked Private. I have been to this lounge many times before and I have to say it is a lot better than the AC. You get free alcohol, decent snacks including satay, and also haagen-daas ice-cream. If I remember correctly, the lounge has four different sections. One section is for smoking (I think) and another section is for working. I proceeded to log onto the internet and also serve myself satays while waiting. I also took a bottle of water for the flight. They changed the brand of bottled water since I was last there. It used to be a blue bottle but this time they had a green bottle. I didn’t wait for the attendant to tell me when to board (even though they have a list of all passengers in the flagship lounge and what time their flight left) because I like to be the first one of the plane to stow my bag. When I arrived at the gate they just began boarding and I went straight on. The flight was full in first but half-empty in economy and was pretty uneventful. Upon landing in DFW at gate C6 (I think), I walked over to terminal A to collect my girlfriend’s car that was parked there. I wanted to pick up the car before collecting my bag from baggage claim so that I won’t have to drag the bag onto the AA Train. It was a quick 10 minute walk from the gate to the car in Terminal A parking. I then drove back to terminal C to collect my bag and waited for my girlfriend to arrive from New Orleans (where she is currently working but still living in Dallas). However, her flight was delayed by an hour so I had time to kill. I went to the AC in terminal C and logged onto the internet again (checked e-mail and FT) and consistently checking what time her flight was suppose to arrive. They had thunderstorms in New Orleans (this was part of the big storm that hit Houston that week) thus her flight left late. After she arrived, I picked her up and we went shopping for some last minute items before our vacation.
June 9th AA1507 DFW-YVR 0934-1158 (757 Y seats: 9BC)
When I booked this trip, AA didn’t have any award seats in F or Y at all. Evidently, lots of people take this flight to YVR to connect to cruises. However, an angel at AA saw that we could get seats on CX (which is suppose to be the hardest part) and couldn’t get it for this one portion connecting to CX and she called someone in inventory management to release two economy award seats for us. When we checked-in at DFW, I told the agent that I only wanted to check-in to YVR. She said no problem but then the system produced our boarding passes and bag tags for YVR and HKG. I told her that I only wanted to check-in to YVR and not onto HKG. The reason is that they didn’t have the CX priority tags in DFW and I didn’t want to wait for my bags to come out in HKG. Priority tags work really well in HKG (please below). I explained it to the agent but she said that they had new blue oneworld tags that they could put on. I didn’t trust those tags so I continued to ask for the bags to be only tagged to YVR. She couldn’t figure out what to do and they consulted with another check-in agent who helped her. The other agent said that many people also request the same thing but couldn’t understand why. In the end, she issued our bag tags just to YVR and we still had our boarding passes from YVR-HKG.
I wanted to change seats at the airport but forgot to, as I was busy finishing some e-mails at the AC. The good part was that seats 9BC are by itself. The bad part was that it was the first row right next to the bathroom. Thus during the flight lots of people were waiting for the bathroom and often knocked my feet or seat. We skipped breakfast, which was french toast (and looked pretty good) because my girlfriend was fast asleep (due to being up the night before packing very late) and I already had something to eat before we boarded. We pretty much slept through the whole flight so there wasn’t much to report. Upon landing at YVR we went through immigration which had long lines. Looks like a plane from Taiwan had also landed just ahead of us. After about 30 minutes it was our turn and it didn’t take long. The immigration officer handed our passports back without chopping it so I asked her whether she could chop our passports. My girlfriend and I both like collecting passport chops. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif
June 9th CX839 YVR-HKG 1600-2025 (747-400 F seats: 4DG)
After collecting our bags at YVR, I went to the AA ticket counter to have one of our segments revalidated. It was a simple date change but it took the agent 20 minutes to process it. He had to manually type in all the taxes again. We were really hungry so we proceeded to the food court which was located between the US departures and other international departures. I told my girlfriend that we shouldn’t eat too much because there is probably some food in the lounge and lots to eat on the plane. In the end we just ordered one thing to share. I am glad we did that! After our brief lunch, we proceeded to the CX check-in which was virtually empty. They took our bags and put the red priority tags on and re-issued our boarding passes. We passed through the area for paying the airport fee showing our ticket indicating that we were just transiting thus avoiding paying the fee. After that we headed for the lounge. It was relatively empty when we arrived because it was still early. The lounge is a shared one for first and business class passengers. The décor looked old especially when compared to the Wing or even the AA flagship lounge. However, it had lots of sushi and dim sum to offer and we just sat there eating and drinking for a long time but made sure we left space in our stomachs for the plane food. After hanging around for over an hour, I wanted to walk around the airport before getting stuck on a plane for 13 hours. There weren’t too many shops so soon we found ourselves at the gate. We waited around and boarding started at 3:35pm. I thought it was a little late for boarding a 747. The flight was full today in all classes but they still managed to get everyone on by 4pm. Pretty impressive!
Upon boarding, we took our assigned seats that were two middle seats next to each other on the last row. I like this row instead of row 3 because there is slightly more space between us and the people sitting in the window seats. We were immediately offered drinks and canapés. We both had their Krug Champagne, which I loved prior to take-off. We were also handed our amenity kits which we didn’t open at all, another package that contained our slippers and eye-shades, and finally our sleeper suits. I took a couple of pictures and then stored my bags in the overhead lockers. It was the first time that my girlfriend has experienced international first class and she was suitably impressed. I didn’t say too much to her before the flight because I didn’t want her to have too high expectations and then be disappointed. This worked and she loved the flight. She doesn’t like to fly that much, well at least no where near the amount I like to fly but this time she really didn’t mind too much. After take-off we were given our menus and we asked for our personal in-flight movies. I found CX’s movie selection to be rather old. This is probably because CX only rotates their personal video selection every three months. So we had a selection that was for April-June and thus was a little old. BA’s personal video selection changes every 2 months so it is more up to date. Nonetheless, we had a good selection of videos that we haven’t watched to choose from.
After take-off we changed into our sleeper suits. I didn’t take the menu so I don’t have the complete list here. Basically, the menu had three sections: lunch, refreshments and dinner. We were served lunch upon take-off, and then you could have refreshments anytime during the flight and then dinner prior to arrival. However, if you wanted to mix it around, they allowed you to do that without any problem. I ended up having refreshments prior to landing and skipped their dinner selection. For lunch, they served caviar accompanied by salmon that was carved right in front of you. I liked both the caviar and salmon so much that I had a second helping. Even though first class was full and almost everyone was eating, they had plenty of caviar and salmon left. After that, my girlfriend had the soup which I skipped because it was a cream based soup and I cannot take dairy products. We were both going to have the salad as well but I told them that I would skip the salad as I was already pretty full after the second helping of appetizers. They asked whether I wanted to wait for my girlfriend to finish and soup and salad before they served our main courses together so I said sure. It felt just like a restaurant where they waited for the main courses to be served together. In the mean time, I was onto my fourth glass of champagne and feeling pretty happy! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif For the main course, I had duck with rice and Chinese vegetables. My girlfriend had the lobster thermidor, which she liked but felt it was a little heavy. For dessert, she had haagen daas ice-cream and I just had a fruit plate where the fruit was already peeled and cut into pieces.
The best part of the flight for the both of us was being able to lie down flat and sleep. After dinner they brought our duvets and I asked for additional blankets. I wanted to put the duvets underneath myself and have blankets covering me. The FA told me that they didn’t have any extra blankets which I found strange. I thought that they also carried blankets for first class passengers in addition to the duvets. As it turned out, we both slept really well with the duvet on top of us. The seats didn’t seem as hard as the last time I slept in them but that’s probably because I was pretty tired and I didn’t notice it that much. There are 2 features of the seat that I liked when sleeping. The first one was that there was a white partition that you could slide out that blocked off the view from the person sitting at the window when you are asleep. The second was that the arm rest can be pushed down all the way so it didn’t intrude into the seat. So in effect it was easier to move around although I almost fell out of the seat when I was turning around which prompted me to raise the arm rest again. I’m sure other people would find it more useful.
During the flight I was able to chat with the FA’s a bit and we talked about the radiation issue flying across the pole. They told me that the FA’s didn’t have a say in the matter and weren’t given any check-ups to see if the radiation affected their bodies or not. I also mentioned that I loved the Krug and they promptly gave me a bottle!! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif
Prior to landing, I had some noodles served in soup and also a Chinese hot pot that contained rice, Chinese sausages and vegetables. Both tasted pretty good. We landed at gate 3 in HKG and proceeded straight to immigration. I went with my girlfriend to the HK permanent resident line but we were turned away because my girlfriend didn’t have a HK ID card. So we waited in the visitors line for about 10 minutes. After immigration we went straight to baggage claim and our bags were already out! After we took our bags, the business class bags started coming out! All that hard work in DFW to let us re-check our bags in YVR made it worthwhile! We then took the airport express and my parents met us at the HK station and off we went to our home (well, what used to be my home before I moved England and then to the States).
To be continued….
[This message has been edited by bagold (edited 06-27-2001).]
Here was the itinerary:
BOS-DFW (AA First)
DFW-YVR (AA Economy)
YVR-HKG (CX First)
HKG-BKK (CX Business)
BKK-HKT (TG Business)
HKT-BKK (TG Business)
BKK-HKG (CX Business)
HKG-YVR (CX First)
YVR-DFW (AA Business)
DFW-BOS (AA First)
June 8th AA1079 BOS-DFW 1448-1812 (757 F Seat: 2E)
I checked-in at the Terminal B counter with my bag tagged to DFW. My girlfriend lives in DFW, hence, my trip to DFW to meet up with her before flying off to YVR. Technically, this was only a stop-over but since the next flight from DFW-YVR wasn’t until the next morning, I was allowed to overnight in DFW. After checking-in at the counter, I proceeded to the Admirals Club and presented my BA Gold card. The person working at the desk said that I was entitled to use the flagship lounge and actually took me to the lounge and introduced me to the person working in the flagship lounge. The flagship lounge is located at the back right side of the AC with a door marked Private. I have been to this lounge many times before and I have to say it is a lot better than the AC. You get free alcohol, decent snacks including satay, and also haagen-daas ice-cream. If I remember correctly, the lounge has four different sections. One section is for smoking (I think) and another section is for working. I proceeded to log onto the internet and also serve myself satays while waiting. I also took a bottle of water for the flight. They changed the brand of bottled water since I was last there. It used to be a blue bottle but this time they had a green bottle. I didn’t wait for the attendant to tell me when to board (even though they have a list of all passengers in the flagship lounge and what time their flight left) because I like to be the first one of the plane to stow my bag. When I arrived at the gate they just began boarding and I went straight on. The flight was full in first but half-empty in economy and was pretty uneventful. Upon landing in DFW at gate C6 (I think), I walked over to terminal A to collect my girlfriend’s car that was parked there. I wanted to pick up the car before collecting my bag from baggage claim so that I won’t have to drag the bag onto the AA Train. It was a quick 10 minute walk from the gate to the car in Terminal A parking. I then drove back to terminal C to collect my bag and waited for my girlfriend to arrive from New Orleans (where she is currently working but still living in Dallas). However, her flight was delayed by an hour so I had time to kill. I went to the AC in terminal C and logged onto the internet again (checked e-mail and FT) and consistently checking what time her flight was suppose to arrive. They had thunderstorms in New Orleans (this was part of the big storm that hit Houston that week) thus her flight left late. After she arrived, I picked her up and we went shopping for some last minute items before our vacation.
June 9th AA1507 DFW-YVR 0934-1158 (757 Y seats: 9BC)
When I booked this trip, AA didn’t have any award seats in F or Y at all. Evidently, lots of people take this flight to YVR to connect to cruises. However, an angel at AA saw that we could get seats on CX (which is suppose to be the hardest part) and couldn’t get it for this one portion connecting to CX and she called someone in inventory management to release two economy award seats for us. When we checked-in at DFW, I told the agent that I only wanted to check-in to YVR. She said no problem but then the system produced our boarding passes and bag tags for YVR and HKG. I told her that I only wanted to check-in to YVR and not onto HKG. The reason is that they didn’t have the CX priority tags in DFW and I didn’t want to wait for my bags to come out in HKG. Priority tags work really well in HKG (please below). I explained it to the agent but she said that they had new blue oneworld tags that they could put on. I didn’t trust those tags so I continued to ask for the bags to be only tagged to YVR. She couldn’t figure out what to do and they consulted with another check-in agent who helped her. The other agent said that many people also request the same thing but couldn’t understand why. In the end, she issued our bag tags just to YVR and we still had our boarding passes from YVR-HKG.
I wanted to change seats at the airport but forgot to, as I was busy finishing some e-mails at the AC. The good part was that seats 9BC are by itself. The bad part was that it was the first row right next to the bathroom. Thus during the flight lots of people were waiting for the bathroom and often knocked my feet or seat. We skipped breakfast, which was french toast (and looked pretty good) because my girlfriend was fast asleep (due to being up the night before packing very late) and I already had something to eat before we boarded. We pretty much slept through the whole flight so there wasn’t much to report. Upon landing at YVR we went through immigration which had long lines. Looks like a plane from Taiwan had also landed just ahead of us. After about 30 minutes it was our turn and it didn’t take long. The immigration officer handed our passports back without chopping it so I asked her whether she could chop our passports. My girlfriend and I both like collecting passport chops. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif
June 9th CX839 YVR-HKG 1600-2025 (747-400 F seats: 4DG)
After collecting our bags at YVR, I went to the AA ticket counter to have one of our segments revalidated. It was a simple date change but it took the agent 20 minutes to process it. He had to manually type in all the taxes again. We were really hungry so we proceeded to the food court which was located between the US departures and other international departures. I told my girlfriend that we shouldn’t eat too much because there is probably some food in the lounge and lots to eat on the plane. In the end we just ordered one thing to share. I am glad we did that! After our brief lunch, we proceeded to the CX check-in which was virtually empty. They took our bags and put the red priority tags on and re-issued our boarding passes. We passed through the area for paying the airport fee showing our ticket indicating that we were just transiting thus avoiding paying the fee. After that we headed for the lounge. It was relatively empty when we arrived because it was still early. The lounge is a shared one for first and business class passengers. The décor looked old especially when compared to the Wing or even the AA flagship lounge. However, it had lots of sushi and dim sum to offer and we just sat there eating and drinking for a long time but made sure we left space in our stomachs for the plane food. After hanging around for over an hour, I wanted to walk around the airport before getting stuck on a plane for 13 hours. There weren’t too many shops so soon we found ourselves at the gate. We waited around and boarding started at 3:35pm. I thought it was a little late for boarding a 747. The flight was full today in all classes but they still managed to get everyone on by 4pm. Pretty impressive!
Upon boarding, we took our assigned seats that were two middle seats next to each other on the last row. I like this row instead of row 3 because there is slightly more space between us and the people sitting in the window seats. We were immediately offered drinks and canapés. We both had their Krug Champagne, which I loved prior to take-off. We were also handed our amenity kits which we didn’t open at all, another package that contained our slippers and eye-shades, and finally our sleeper suits. I took a couple of pictures and then stored my bags in the overhead lockers. It was the first time that my girlfriend has experienced international first class and she was suitably impressed. I didn’t say too much to her before the flight because I didn’t want her to have too high expectations and then be disappointed. This worked and she loved the flight. She doesn’t like to fly that much, well at least no where near the amount I like to fly but this time she really didn’t mind too much. After take-off we were given our menus and we asked for our personal in-flight movies. I found CX’s movie selection to be rather old. This is probably because CX only rotates their personal video selection every three months. So we had a selection that was for April-June and thus was a little old. BA’s personal video selection changes every 2 months so it is more up to date. Nonetheless, we had a good selection of videos that we haven’t watched to choose from.
After take-off we changed into our sleeper suits. I didn’t take the menu so I don’t have the complete list here. Basically, the menu had three sections: lunch, refreshments and dinner. We were served lunch upon take-off, and then you could have refreshments anytime during the flight and then dinner prior to arrival. However, if you wanted to mix it around, they allowed you to do that without any problem. I ended up having refreshments prior to landing and skipped their dinner selection. For lunch, they served caviar accompanied by salmon that was carved right in front of you. I liked both the caviar and salmon so much that I had a second helping. Even though first class was full and almost everyone was eating, they had plenty of caviar and salmon left. After that, my girlfriend had the soup which I skipped because it was a cream based soup and I cannot take dairy products. We were both going to have the salad as well but I told them that I would skip the salad as I was already pretty full after the second helping of appetizers. They asked whether I wanted to wait for my girlfriend to finish and soup and salad before they served our main courses together so I said sure. It felt just like a restaurant where they waited for the main courses to be served together. In the mean time, I was onto my fourth glass of champagne and feeling pretty happy! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif For the main course, I had duck with rice and Chinese vegetables. My girlfriend had the lobster thermidor, which she liked but felt it was a little heavy. For dessert, she had haagen daas ice-cream and I just had a fruit plate where the fruit was already peeled and cut into pieces.
The best part of the flight for the both of us was being able to lie down flat and sleep. After dinner they brought our duvets and I asked for additional blankets. I wanted to put the duvets underneath myself and have blankets covering me. The FA told me that they didn’t have any extra blankets which I found strange. I thought that they also carried blankets for first class passengers in addition to the duvets. As it turned out, we both slept really well with the duvet on top of us. The seats didn’t seem as hard as the last time I slept in them but that’s probably because I was pretty tired and I didn’t notice it that much. There are 2 features of the seat that I liked when sleeping. The first one was that there was a white partition that you could slide out that blocked off the view from the person sitting at the window when you are asleep. The second was that the arm rest can be pushed down all the way so it didn’t intrude into the seat. So in effect it was easier to move around although I almost fell out of the seat when I was turning around which prompted me to raise the arm rest again. I’m sure other people would find it more useful.
During the flight I was able to chat with the FA’s a bit and we talked about the radiation issue flying across the pole. They told me that the FA’s didn’t have a say in the matter and weren’t given any check-ups to see if the radiation affected their bodies or not. I also mentioned that I loved the Krug and they promptly gave me a bottle!! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif
Prior to landing, I had some noodles served in soup and also a Chinese hot pot that contained rice, Chinese sausages and vegetables. Both tasted pretty good. We landed at gate 3 in HKG and proceeded straight to immigration. I went with my girlfriend to the HK permanent resident line but we were turned away because my girlfriend didn’t have a HK ID card. So we waited in the visitors line for about 10 minutes. After immigration we went straight to baggage claim and our bags were already out! After we took our bags, the business class bags started coming out! All that hard work in DFW to let us re-check our bags in YVR made it worthwhile! We then took the airport express and my parents met us at the HK station and off we went to our home (well, what used to be my home before I moved England and then to the States).
To be continued….
[This message has been edited by bagold (edited 06-27-2001).]