Originally Posted by
HkCaGu
1. But then many nationalities now do not need a visa to transit China for 24 or 48 hours.
I dont believe this is the case for US Citizens - the 48 hours transit only applied at PVG. There are many such talks in the Mileage Run forum and airline forums about whether people need the Chinese Visa to do a mileage run when there are cheap coach fare sales between US and China, and the elites can upgrade their cheapo coach tickets with SWUs to biz. It is an often-discussed topic that it has mentioned many times only PVG affords such transit allowance for US citizens.
Originally Posted by
HkCaGu
2. For HKers, current and former, the convenience may also lie in the flexibility of the multiple airports in the PRD region. If you know your way on the surface, SZX and CAN open up in addition to MFM (which isn't that convenient coming from far away).
None of the above interests any of the FTers I talked to - they only fly back HKG to visit their parents a few times a year. None has any desire to travel into the neighboring Chinese cities.
Again, what they want is they could hunt for business class award seats using a much broader route map than if they have to apply a Chinese Visa before entering China.
Star A has multiple mainland China airlines in its alliance - all of them fly at least to Japan and Korea, some of them fly to US also, but all would route through China before one could get to HKG. While their business class seats may not be as good as CX or even UA, at least they are still better than a coach seat even on CX. It is insane to fly that long haul in coach if one has enough miles to do the business class award. That is what the miles are for!