Originally Posted by
Bbcei
Well, they do make it easy for the vast majority of their customers, who are domestic. I think moondog wrote about how foreign customers are an afterthought (if that) for most Chinese businesses.
Foreigners who buy tickets directly from MU (instead of through a codeshare, or something like Trip.com / Amex Business Travel / CWT), then need to pay for a change with a foreign CC, form a tiny portion of MU's clientele. No MU employee is going to get a promotion for making payment easier in such a niche situation, so no one is going to work on it.
Reminds me of trying to deal with Beijing Capital airlines in Jan20 and trying to bring forward the return flight date to get out of China back to the UK quicker. Something to do with a mystery virus. Anyways....
Ticket was originally bought directly with Beijing Capital on their international site in GBP. Whilst the call centre were being reasonably helpful they were quoting around EUR2000 per person to change the return sector in J even though it should have been priced based on historical values, could not explain why it had to be priced in EUR rather than GBP or RMB, and it would require photos of the front and rear of the payment card and passport ID page of card holder to be emailed to a hnair.com email address. A lovely invitation for both payment and ID fraud which I declined.
This rigmarole caused us to discover that a new one way J ticket with CX via HKG back to LHR was going to be cheaper, and we would be entitled to a refund of the unflown sector from Beijing Capital under Chinese government rules, although getting the refund took quite some while and they also asked for photos of payment card to refund to which was again refused
I even had a comment many months later when my travel insurance finally settled up noting that I had made the effort to minimise additional cost to exit China.