Originally Posted by QRC3288

I like your suggestion. I hope they take it. But I think you’re also highlighting the precise problem I’m getting at with what I see as the misdirection of this “A330 regional J” marketing campaign. CX has 17x highly profitable, high-density 773s that they just can’t resist deploying to high yield/high density markets like Tokyo. I remember flights a decade ago, that same morning departure still cramming a 773 or the old (regional) 772s and us paying a thousand or two USD for the privilege. And CX also now has 16x highly profitable, highly-versatile A321s which are equally tempting to swap in to places when the economics make sense.




Haha yes indeed, but the percentage isn’t really my point. 25%, 33%, 50% - it’s not that relevant to the disappointed booker who thinks he’s getting product X and instead gets product Y.

Until you get to some crazy high percentage (say 90%), where you basically know what product you paid for unless you get awful luck or irrops, moving from 30%s to 50%s doesn’t really address the issue. Maybe CX will actually “protect” certain products on certain routes (which I’ve never seen in my near two decades of flying CX regionally!), but unless that happens I don’t see how this "upgrade some of our planes with Aria Studios (including some which are already long-haul configged anyway)" changes their swap/aircraft allocation behavior. Not impossible, but seems unlikely.

The old faithful method (book a flight where they sell F) is also going away as F disappears. You do raise a good point that booking a PEY-equipped flight is a good idea, but it's not the lock that booking an F flight was. Unlike old F-equipped planes, CX regularly swaps out PEY on regional routes and bumps up those pax to regional J sometimes. I also don't think PEY is a popular buy for short-haul flights, it's Y or J. (More of a connecting product.) But mostly just pointing out here, it's not the same success-level trick booking a PEY-equipped plane as booking an F-equipped plane.

If I’m to call a spade a spade, it’s this: CX is pretending they’re competing with SQ “flat beds in regional J,” when in reality my odds go up a bit, but those of us flying CX regional J 30–50+ times a year are still going to be in this uncomfortable regional J on A330s, 773s, and A321s for the foreseeable future.

It’s better than no change, but it’s not the sea change it’s being described as. Unless CX addresses the A321s and B773s.

The A321 suffers from the same problem as the B773, btw it’s a special, versatile, profitable aircraft. I can’t blame them for deploying those planes when convenient, but this media stuff is trying to have it both ways it seems - market a flat bed regional J while still flying these uncomfortable aircraft around. Anyway we'll see where they settle. If they really are giving consumers the false impression they're "guaranteed" lie-flat bed J regionally on such and such flight, I'm sure that will backfire.

Btw, the A321 can hit basically any regional distance and even some mid-length routes like South Asia, maybe the ME, and northern Australasia. Shudder if they give in to that temptation. I wouldn’t put it past them. They sure used to, occasionally dropping regional J products into the Middle East and Australia when I first started flying CX in the mid-2000s.