I flew CX for the first time in my life last week (SIN-BKK in J; BKK-HKG-YVR-JFK in F), and absolutely loved it. Those of you who find fault with their product offering should spend more time on U.S. carriers, on which most of my time is spent!

My SIN-BKK flight was in NBC on a 777. As it was a short flight, I can't attest to how the seats would be for a long-haul flight, but both the seat and the service was head-and-shoulders above what one could expect on any U.S. domestic flight, even the premium NY-LA flights.

The BKK-HKG and HKG-YVR-JFK flights were fabulous as well. My only complaint has to do with CX's operations in YVR (which I suspect they contract out, rather than operate themselves). What should have been a scheduled 80 minute layover lasted for two hours. The gate agents claimed that it took them that long to service the plane. (Since this flight operates every day in two directions, I would have thought that they would be experienced in servicing the plane in the allotted time.) Worse, when I expressed concern to the gate agents at YVR about missing my connection at JFK (I was connecting to an AA JFK-BOS flight), they just fed me the same misinformation that I would expect from the U.S. carriers: we'll be leaving in five minutes (impossible since the plane hadn't even been boarded); you will land by 9:00 (again, impossible once the boarding process and flight time is factored in). It was clear to me that their only interest was getting us out of there; they didn't really care if I made my connection or not. Once I was back on board the plane, I informed the FAs of my concern about my connection, and they did everything they possible could, including sending a telex to the ground personnel in NY alerting them to my situation. (As one might expect, the NY ground personnel did nothing special for me; by the time we landed, I still had over an hour to make my connection. I did make it, but only because my bag was one of the first off the plane, there was no line at customs, and I ran to the Airtrane and from the Airtrane to AA.)

Although I would love to see CX dedicate more resources to their North American operations, it still was a fabulous experience. It's going to be awfully hard going back to AA's crummy F offerings.