I live in China and I’ve been using CTrip for years. Essentially every flight on my current 12 flight around the world trip, I booked on CTrip. They accept UnionPay and WeChat, which means I even use them for booking U.S. domestic travel, as often my “spending” money is in my Chinese accounts, not my Americans accounts, and transfering money is a PITA. I have tried to book directly with China Eastern, China Southern, Hainan, and HK Express, in my experience China Southern is the only website that is easily usable. The others, I get bogged down with various issues, such as captchas not working, or the fare not being available, or the UnionPay payment page being broken (a huge issue with AirAsia, hell I tried to book AirAsia with my American Visa card and ended up being trapped in Verify by Visa hell, with AirAsia rejecting my card even after contacting my bank and my bank approving the transaction) and I ultimately book with CTrip. I have never really had a nightmare with them before, and hopefully this can be solved as well. I may need to call Hainan Airliens when I get back to China. I had to do that last spring when I had a China Southern flight to Beijing end up being cancelled because of runway construction, CTrip wasn’t that much help, but China Southern sorted out the issue.

While it is ridiculous that CTrip’s IT allowed them to automatically rebook me on an impossible itinerary, Hainan is the responsible party as they cancelled their morning flight from Kunming to Beijing. I am hopeful that the solution will be that they rebook me on a different carrier in the morning to Beijing, and I catch that same Hainan flight to Chicago.