Originally Posted by
WhisperjetYYZ
Wow Happy - thx for all the encouraging words for a trip I am very much looking forward to
During my research - in addition to what you went thru, I did come across some trip reports with a positive experience in CA F
Good for those few lucky souls who have positive experiences with CA F.
The hard products are fine. The soft products are nonexistent, from quality of the F&B to the services,
How can there no meal loaded for F? and they could only find 4 spare dishes for us to choose from? I did not have high expectation on CA, F or not. But we wanted to go to PEK at that time. After the experience I would completely rule out CA - and that is not just for the poor offerings, but also the potential danger of mysteriously canceled booking on their F long haul flights because there are inside collusion of selling award seats - when UA ticketed award bookings were vulnerable from such stealing.
https://www.travelcodex.com/more-pro...award-flights/
This remains an ongoing problem since 2016 or even earlier than that,. Never is really resolved because Guess What, it is inside job!
Just a few months ago I read on a Chinese site, someone booked his parents on CA F from China to US. Everything looked fine, until less than a week before departure he got an email "confirming" his cancellation of those bookings! Needless to say he had not canceled anything - the reservations were canceled from inside China, directly into the GDS system... He had to scramble to find alternatives. For that horror show he wrote a Heads Up titled as loosely translated to English "If you value your life, stay away from Air China" to document his very stressful experiences and the tremendous efforts he needed to find seats on NH so his parents could still leave on schedule. Oh, the miles from the canceled bookings were not recoverable due to some technical reasons for which he was told but I forgot what they were.
If you have a chance to modify your itinerary, you would probably be better off to swap out CA.