Originally Posted by
travelinmanS
Believe it JieJie. I've used these fares for the past 2 years. Nothing has ever gone wrong for me on the Ctrip side of things. I can usually get AA PVG-LAX or SFO round trip in biz class for 2200-2500 USD. Sometimes it's even cheaper. The one time I had a problem is when AA delayed the flight by 10 hours due to "crew rest issues". Ctrip promptly refunded the entire ticket amount to my Union Pay card and I purchased another ticket on Cathay.
For the specific HKG-LAX fare the dog mentioned, they have been offering this since mid-August leading up to the launch of the flight. The only online travel agent I've seen it on is Ctrip. It doesn't show up on Kayak or any of the other sites so it seems to be an exclusive deal and someone who wants a business class flight on that route would be nuts to pass it up.
Ctrip customer service is far and away better than any of the USA online travel agencies and I would have no hesitation about using them to purchase tickets anywhere in the world and have done so numerous times!
But you are not addressing my main concern. You are talking about flights originating in PVG or HKG. I specifically mentioned/implied in a post above that for intl flights originating in China (I'll extend that to HK) ctrip is not a problem and I have used them for these sorts of flights. But @no1cub17 was talking about a USA-Europe flight, and I see a difference in that. I find it very hard to believe that ctrip would have some sort of special insight on this sort of routing, that momondo or some of the other OTA's would not have.
I have increasing doubts about ctrip, so I'm happy that your experience with them has been hunky-dory to date, and that you have a rousing endorsement to use them for any ticket from any two points. At this point though, I personally prefer to limit my exposure for any one ticket/transaction with them to under USD 700-800.