Cathay Pacific Asia Miles - JFK to SIN

My wife will be travelling to Sinapore for the first time in January and was hoping to get a feel for what she might expect/experience on both the flight and on the ground. Her out of the country experiences so far consist of Toronto and the Caribbean so she has been a bit sheltered.

You advise-guidance is greatly appreciated. Oh - and she will be traveling business class so hopefully that will help.

My wife will be travelling to Sinapore for the first time in January and was hoping to get a feel for what she might expect/experience on both the flight and on the ground. Her out of the country experiences so far consist of Toronto and the Caribbean so she has been a bit sheltered.

You advise-guidance is greatly appreciated. Oh - and she will be traveling business class so hopefully that will help.

Singapore is the place for an easy introduction to Asia - most people speak English (even if they do have a funny accent - Google the term Singlish to see what I mean), everything works more or less like it's supposed to, you won't see miles of slums or heaps of garbage on the streets and the traffic (other than being on the other side of the road) is pretty tame.

However, westernized though it may be, Singapore is still a foreign country with lots of special customs and peculiarities to observe and a lot of fascinating places to explore. There's a good book available on amazon called Culture Shock: Singapore. I suggest your wife reads it if she's headed over there for business. Otherwise, I can recommend the recently revamped Lonely Planet City Guide Singapore.

The flight - well, it all depends on who she is flying with, but international business class tends to be pretty good. If she's flying Singapore Airlines (which fly JFK-SIN with a stop in Frankfurt), chances are it will be sublime. She may want to fly nonstop to Singapore out of EWR, it will reduce total travel time slightly (from 21 hours - 8 hours to FRA, 1 hour layover, 12 hours to SIN), but that would be a nonstop flight of something like 18 hours. Some people prefer to have a chance to leave the aircraft and strech their legs a bit in FRA. Either way, NYC-SIN is one of the longer hauls out there. Even in business it won't be easy. Singapore is 12 hours ahead of NYC, which means you'll have the jetlag from hell for a couple days as your body tries to figure out whether it's today, tomorrow or yesterday - never mind what time.

Climate-wise, Singapore is easy to describe - hot and wet. It's perpetually 88° during the day and 78° at night, with relatively high humidity. Singapore rests just one degree above the equator, so it's about as tropical as you can get. Be forewarned, because of this climate, the air-con tends to be vicious, leaving you with the slightly surreal experience of seeing people who wear a tank-top outdoors put on a sweater to enter a building.

On the whole though, Singapore is one of my favorite places worldwide to visit. I lived there for a while and have many fond memories of the places and the surrounding coutries and their beaches.

I've taken the SQ nonstop EWR-SIN and return in Executive Economy. That was delightful. It was a long flight (trimmed to 17 hours thanks to very favorable winds over Europe) but it passed more or less comfortably. It would have been much better in Business Class, of course.

That said, since you're posting in the CX forum, I imagine your wife is considering taking CX for one reason or another. She'll have the option of flying JFK-HKG nonstop or JFK-YVR-HKG direct, then connecting on one of the many daily flights down to SIN. The nonstop to HKG is 16ish hours, plus another three down to SIN.

Either CX or SQ will have superb service inflight, with countless on-demand in-flight entertainment options, great food, wonderful FA's, and so on. Since she's never been to Asia before, making a transit stop at HKG (I mean just a couple of hours to walk around) might be worth it just to check out the airport-- Sir Norman Foster's architectural marvel, where CX's The Wing and The Pier offer some of the best airline lounge diversions in the world. While the merits of Skytrax surveys are occassionaly contested, CX did win Best Airline of the Year, The Wing and The Pier won Best Airline Lounges, and HKG-Chek Lap Kok won Best Airport.

This will be an easy and enjoyable trip. CX in business is generally good. Entertainment, food, service, and seat comfort will be better than what she is used to if only a domestic US/Can/Carib flyer.

There will be no language barrier either on CX or in Singapore. Dining choices both in the air and on the ground should also provide a nice choice of either western or local depending on how adventurous she feels. In HK, I have often heard SIN reffered to as "Asia for beginners", and after visiting can see how it is a great introduction for western travellers.

Singapre is exteremely clean, safe, and easy to get around.

The length of flight and heat/humidity will probably be the biggest "challenges"

I do this route many times a year. I used to do it on CX with CX889 through YVR and connecting in HKG. The CX non-stop from JFK gets in too late to connect to SIN. So, I stopped taking CX altogther. Now I take AA JFK-NRT and connect with the JL AA-codeshare or the UA flight to SIN.

The overall flight time is less than using CX889 because you don't have the added stop in YVR. Its a shame because I really like CX but the stop in YVR and the lack of a late night SIN connection from the CX JFK-HKG n/s in HKG makes the AA through NRT scenario a no-brainer for me.