Originally Posted by
percysmith
Planes are frequently in the air for not a lot more than 6 hours on the route even they're blocked for 7.
That's a pretty short mid-haul. OK, longer than India but certainly shorter than Australia.
Roughly similar to a TATL eastbound. I'll use that as comparison (albeit, expecting CX to do better than the likes of BA/AA).
Em, par for the course, given just more than 6 hours flight time.
Compared to...? Haven't CX flown A330s on the route pre-Covid too? Or are you comparing to EK
Yes, schedule is the premium you're paying for.
Any options for you? Serious question - feels like we're a bunch of South Vietnamese after "liberation" looking for the best smuggler boat out.
Re: seating comparison, whilst post-Covid I've been doing DXB quite a bit, pre-Covid it had been quite a few years. But can compare to India pre-Covid (DEL, BOM and MAA), which varied a bit. I think the issue is that CX claim 18" rather than 17.5" seats, but the armrests are so narrow everyone's elbows inevitably encroach on everyone else's space.
(Aside: I'm not comparing vs EK as they're an airline which has long annoyed me - claiming to be "THE award winning airline" which infers no other airline is award winning (especially when considering the significance of using "the" in Arabic). And I fear CX are going this way, in terms of claiming premium service (and charging premium prices) whilst standards actually slip considerably. I guess that at least EK often don't charge premium fares in Y)
The schedule is a fraction of what it was HKG-Middle East. From 2x daily HKG-DXB and up to daily HKG-BAH, now once daily HKG-DXB. (Excepting recent cancellations!) And the flight time of the once daily service isn't that great - I always used to grab the overnight HKG-DXB flight to connect onwards in daytime and then fly back on the midnight/post-midnight flight from DXB, enabling easier sleep. Now it's arrive late evening, so either spend a night in DXB or rock-up wherever in the small hours of the morning, having missed a night's sleep and hence not being rested to start work; and then coming home, departing DXB a few hours before being sleepy, so resulting in at most a couple of hours' sleep.
Given that this is to fly onwards to RUH, seems QR will be who I fly with next. Twice daily connections HKG-DOH-RUH and theoretically two, though in practical terms one convenient connection daily on homeward leg. As I've now (as of last week) lost Silver, I don't get any discernible benefits on CX any more anyway. No priority or semi-priority check-in or boarding, etc.
But yes, the problem is whilst QR might suit for the Middle East and offers an alternative to LHR for West Africa, it doesn't really help once I start travelling again within E/SE/S Asia...