I am actually born and raised in HKG, it's just that I am currently in the US, so perhaps I don't know the current exact situation. When I mentioned 'lesser evil of the two', I meant:
1. Paid F/J customers seeing non-revs self-upgrading to their cabin chitchatting with the crew and making the crew not being able to serve other paid F/J customers.
vs.
1. Paid F/J customers seeing award takers on the route.
If F/J customers are equally disgusted(I would be, in either case), then it makes no difference how CX releases the F awards right? Now, you can find 'Blog with Lucky' getting on EK, SQ, AF F, which I believe mostly in points. As long as you can game the systems(e.g. using AS, CA, and AA miles to redeem CX F or other F cabin), you could get any F seats you want. Should paid customers be bad? If so, they are mad all the time. AF/KL/AY, DL/UA are all selling surplus of J/F seats at a huge discount than the market prices close to day of departure. If one pays 20k USD, should they bad pissed at others paying upgrade fees to sit at the same cabin as them, or maybe get treated worse because they have no status? To me, this is more of the first world problem than anything else.
IMHO, US treats the unions and the FAs way too well - Non-revs proaching AA F, UA F, and DL J when all the seats go unsold or they don't get released to the award takers, so half of the F seats will be taken by the non-revs at the gate. I hate that way more than what CX is doing - Leaving most space to awards. At least the other airlines pay the miles to fly their customers on CX. I do know CX treats their employees pretty bad. I know a couple of FAs telling me they couldn't even get J seats easily on stand-by. To me, getting free seats, Y+/Y is already a huge perk. If you see all non-revs sitting in Fs, I bet you would raise the similar questions as UA or DL people did in their forums:
Will UA bump J to F to process J GPUs?
delta one seats go to non-rev employees
To us, you better hope CX keep doing this, or else we would see overall less award seats released to AM/MPCs, or any other OneWorld partners.
At the end, would you rather have CX release more Y seats like UA/DL so you can redeem to get on them while non-revs get on all the F seats, or, CX releases more F seats, then keep the non-revs on Y?
I would certainly hope the former, as the customer perspective. Not that I would definitely redeem 110k BA/AA miles for CX F for sure, however.
