Originally Posted by
Passmethesickbag
I have a reservation that will bring me from SYD to HKG at 5 AM, continuing to Europe just after midnight. I have a day room booked at an airport hotel, with a 9 AM check-in. Assuming that I will be checked in straight through to Europe in SYD, is it possible to start the morning as a transit passenger in the terminal, and have breakfast in the lounge, and then exit through immigration and head for my day room?
The SYDHKG CX138 arrives early most of the time, especially at Australia Day light saving times. I some times got out of the airport at 4am. The official opening time for CX lounges are 5:30am, no real food will be served before that. And unless you've got F lounge access, the breakfast at J lounge side is minimum at 5:30, the noodle bar etc start from 6ish. Basically means you will be wasting almost 2 hours before you can have some real hot food. Shower is decent though.
If it was the Regal airport hotel you booked with, there are quite a lot of guests checking out very early (I guess the reason for a person chose to stay at the airport hotel would be to catch an early flight), if your check in time is booked to be 9, I don't think you would have any problems to be actually in the room couple of hours before that. There are one restaurants already open at the airport arrival hall around 4am and you can grab a decent breakfast for under HKD50.
Originally Posted by
QRC3288
My understanding is, there is definitely a rule that you cannot enter without "intent to fly". HKIA executives have told me this. However, I think practically the problem is everyone knows you can't police it. How the heck do you have security enforce that? Boarding pass is enough, most likely, for any passenger to win any argument let alone legal fight about intent to fly. And nobody ever gets in trouble for this, maybe not one person ever. So it would be pretty silly for CX to report people for this. They lose a customer forever, get bad PR, and probably nothing happens to the guy on top of it since how can it be proved anyway. They still have pressure from immigration and security to curtail abuses, though. That's why the fellow who started this discussion is off base...because he essentially said "I'm entitled to abuse this rule, and why aren't you moving fast enough?" They cant obviously just agree to that. So he gets delayed.
There are ways to approach it, and not to approach it, if you're breaking this technical rule. Sadly, an "emergency" is a surefire way to do it. Of course enough abusing it, and this ruins it for those of us who eventually do have an emergency and have to leave. But definitely the way not to approach it is to harangue CX lounge attendants about wanting your arrival shower before you go into town and munch on dim sum for half the day, and criticizing CX for not having an arrival lounge, and saying that's the only reason you came airside.
At some point, folks on here forget not every perceived loophole is actually a loophole. It is just very poorly enforced and/or not yet tested.
Well, they can simply put a price tag. i.e. 500HKD for escort from airside to landside unless your flight rescheduled more than x amount of hours. So if someone wants to visit airside without the intention to fly, they either pay the fee or rebook their flight.