Originally Posted by
QRC3288
I think I can answer the reason here, with a fairly simple illustration. Of my Hk-based social/professional friends people I interface with most regularly (I don't know how to better describe, these are "friends" and "associates", not like my actual mates but people who are in positions in their companies similar to mine and we know each other somewhat), I would say DM is probably the most common title. There are also DM+, IN and VIP. Pls ignore judgement about our lame conversation starters, it is true this is an easy way to break the ice in HK, since Cathay has a big role in a lot of people's monthly and often weekly lives here. It is very easy common ground to start a chat. Despite cumulative hours and hours of small talk about Cathay and a lot of details shared among people, I had never heard of this benefit, not had it ever come up. Seat guarantee, yes. Lounges, drinks on board, J and F seat design, wine, events, all the time conversation. But "cancellation/ticket hold benefit", never
I only read about this benefit here, as it was shutting down. I really felt i had missed something great. My hunch is it was probably heavily used by a small percent of DMs in the known and a majority of us were none the wiser.
I agree with you, and I must admit I've never been able to understand why this benefit is so important (a DM friend try to explain when he wanted to get me onboard a protest against the change last year, but I never really comprehend).
Becuase in my understanding, ticket price generally only goes up. Even if it doesn't go up, it is very rare to have a sudden price cut days (or hours) before the actual flight. So you tend to get the higher (or highest) fare class ticket issued when you use this benefit.
I'm not a big executive, are those people so busy and their schedule so hard to confirm that they need to book 4 seats on every CX580/581 departing in January from 1st to 31st in order to have their yearly family skiing trip?
Apart from CTS (and maybe SHA), are there many ports or flights so full that a DM couldn't get on even with his seat guarantee? But if a flight really is that full, I assume all I and P classes are gone so they effectively need to pay J class fare - then why don't they simply use seat guarantee in the first place rather than holding so many seats that the management couldn't tolerate anymore?
Or those busy execs could only confirm their schedule like 2 hours before the flight so even seat guarantee benefit can't help?