Originally Posted by
graraps
To the people who bang on about consistency being such a strength of OW:
Have you flown MA recently??
MA is the red headed step child of OW, and has taken over the reigns from EI. The rest of OW however is a different matter
Originally Posted by
graraps
Are you pleased with the pay-for-water service concept offered in IB Y? How about the 4-hour 'business class' flights in standard economy seats on IB and BA (no, this is not how all European airlines do it- some actually collapse the middle seat and share the space between the other two)?
To be fair to IB, the product in Spain offered by IB's Spanish competitors is pretty similar.
Originally Posted by
graraps
Had you flown CX "regional" business class when their "region" used to include Australia? Do you think the so-called lieflat CX C product in its first generation (which AFAIK is still flying pretty long sectors e.g. AMS) is a "great travel option", especially when getting access to an arrivals facility is a lottery?
I for one am not the biggest fan of CX regional, however for many services where it is used on 2-5 hour flights, it's far better than the equivalent offered in Europe. It's also equivalent to SQ which is CX's main competitor who is also guilty of subs to non MEL/SYD Australian services.
Originally Posted by
graraps
I hear people banging on about CX lounges. I've not been to a lot, but do they really have such great lounges outside HKG?
Outside of HKG, some CX lounges are a little disappointing, but I think your missing the point. The quality of OW lounges at OW hubs is overall better than that offered by OW's competition. I believe this is also the case at outstations and is not limited to CX.
Originally Posted by
graraps
This post is not meant to say that oneworld is so bad and that the other alliances are so much better. All of them are all over the place and the simple fact is that membership in any of the three alliances should never be interpreted as a guarantee of good service.
IMHO, I find OW offers the best product, however *A offers the best integration. I can't really talk about ST, as I really have only flown AF and CO which is far too small a representation of the alliance.
Originally Posted by
graraps
Personally, I feel that one alliance being better than another is all a matter of geographical coverage and market positioning, and therefore strictly individual.
It's not just about geographical coverage. I still believe it is about the overall quality of the product on offer.
Originally Posted by
graraps
For example, 80% of my travel is within Europe. It would be incredibly foolish to pay for business class for those flights, so I would never make any BA status, and it's always more convenient to connect in the middle as opposed to backtracking and/or suffering a transcon before/after a very short flight, which strikes out flying with 3 out of 4 European ow members. That would leave me with Malev, which is a mediocre airline that's based in a grim airport and only seems to fly to 4 destinations outside of Albania and Moldova.
There are a lot of us who happily pay to fly J even on short haul flights so I don't think you can compare your experience to those who I suspect fly significantly more frequently than yourself.
Originally Posted by
graraps
OTOH, the Skyteam airlines offer fantastic coverage of Europe, with loads of sensible connections, and that's why I mostly fly with them (*A also have good coverage, but I hate FRA and I seem to be very unlucky whenever I fly LX, so I only use them occasionally).
I have flown LX many times and IMHO they are Europe's most consistent carrier. Never fantastic, but almost always good. Most importantly during irrops, LX in my experience handles these extremely well.