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AC Y+Y, CX Y, MH F+J, CX J and CX J (3 carriers, 5 types of equipment, 6 products, a geeky preamble and lots of pics + comments; plus an aside on a meal in Korea where I had to fight with the food)
Background
(Skip this by all means if you’re after the actual trips, photos and commentary. This section really is for the all-out geeks who want to know the minutiae of the booking and planning process – and the sweet anticipation that comes with all that. Go ahead – I won’t be offended, even if I did spend hours and HOURS typing and editing and re-editing for best results!
)
After five long years, I had no more excuses not to go see my folks in HKG, including the dread of 16 hours in the back.
First order of business: find a way to redeem miles I’d been accumulating for the past 15 (!) years on Airmiles. Just as I was looking for a flight to Hong Kong, an ex-colleague invited me to give a talk in Korea. Then I thought of my Avios: this would be a good excuse to try Cathay’s First somehow while I’m in Asia.
Booking a one-way to Seoul from Toronto was actually much easier that I’d anticipated – a few clicks and voila: 5 hours to Vancouver, 1.5 hours layover, 11.5 hours to Seoul. The layover was actually going be a good thing – I could sure use a lounge visit to break up 16+ hours down the back - except I have no status whatsoever with *A, so there went that idea even before it was half-baked. In due course though that would change.
Next was to figure out how to maximise the Avios I had – blow it all on F back from HKG on CX, or spread it around in a combination of F and J? Since this was five months out, I thought I’d have a chance of bagging an F seat, but that was not to be. There were J seats to be had on different days, so that was what I decided to go for (well, more like it was decided for me). So that’s 3 legs out of 6 sorted (YYZ-YVR-ICN on AC in Y; HKG-YYZ on CX in J).
The next challenge then became how to get an F seat somewhere between ICN, HKG and SIN. But as I wanted to get the most bang out of my Avios, that meant also factoring in lounge access. Since CX had recently refurbished the F lounge at the Wing, then the logical thing to do was to do F from HKG-SIN. That would leave me enough miles to also get one intra-Asia J, and another Y segment. From previous experience, Y-ness is always exacerbated when experienced after J or F, so it wasn’t hard to decide to do ICN-HKG in Y. A few taps later – and with the redemption goddess smiling on me, it all came together: ICN-HKG on CX in Y, HKG-SIN on CX in F, SIN-HKG on CX in J.
For those of you in the know, the big horse-fly in that ointment was the notorious CX equipment switcheroo, especially prone to happen to their 744s between HKG and SIN. Exactly why this is only the minions of the Lord of Switch can know. But who cares?! All the warnings from the CX board be damned: I was going to be in CX F!!
And then three weeks out I got the dreaded auto-email notification: the flight had indeed been switched to a 333; differential Avios credited, seat reassigned – drat! Looked and searched and relooked again for days after, CX just wouldn’t switch back a flight with F at any time that would work with the rest of my travel itinerary. Couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned though – what to do?
And then I somehow noticed on the search page there was an MH flight very close to the original CX departure time (I had to connect from the ICN in-bound), with F availability no less. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that before. So the whole thing would add three hours to the trip, but I would get most of what I wanted (MH F on the A380 instead of CX F on their soon to be retired 744, with access to the F lounge at the Wing), and more (F lounge at KUL, plus the Chef-on-call for F pax – more on that later). So that was decided.
As departure day drew closer, a friend who had some kind of status with AC very kindly offered me two passes to the Maple Leaf Lounge at YYZ and YVR, saying, and I paraphrase: a little something to help make long-haul Y a bit less bad. Needless to say I was grateful, not the least because I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of being fed on board… well I knew there would be food to purchase on the 5-hour domestic (over-priced and fast-food type fodder), and hopefully a main meal and a ‘snack’ (what that would entail would be anybody’s guess) on the 11.5-hour intercontinental. North American carriers of course are known for their often abysmal catering – that is if you get anything at all - and I knew when it came to expectations it was best to keep them at sub-basement level, so anything that might come would be a pleasant surprise. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a rather sad state of affairs.
Next up, the flights, pictures and comments.