I am usually a huge CX supporter and love the airline to bits, but over the last 2 years, there have been various updates which have resulted in a large reduction in the amount of useful information there is for passengers. In the last week or two, they updated their multi-city bookings page, and it has now lost all of its good functions, and these changes seem to have been made TO FOOL THE PASSENGERS! There is no other way to put it... it is a clear money grab by whoever is in charge of making these changes. Let me explain.
The CX multi-city booking page used to be a very valuable tool for me when I was scouting out potential flight dates and stopovers for my trips. After entering my planned airports and dates, it would take me to a new page where the cheapest recommended flights would be pre-selected, with all legs popping up on one page after sending in the query. It would also show the total price for the entire journey at the bottom of the page. When I selected a different flight on one of my journey's legs, it would instantly show me the price for the changed itinerary with no issues.
There was also a link in the top left hand corner of the page, and if I clicked it, it would show me a calendar with ±2 days either side of my dates selected for each leg of the trip. The cheapest dates to fly on were always marked with a little red indicator in the corner of the box for the cheapest date on which to fly. This made it easy to change my dates for the multi-leg journey to capture the cheapest ticket prices. Simply put, the multi-city page worked very well and had features that were great for the customer.
It seems that many of these features which could help the passenger save money were removed recently. Now, after sending in the query, I have to manually select my flights for each individual leg of the journey (rather than having the cheapest and best options be automatically selected) and there is no indication as to which flights are the cheapest. For example, if I wanted to fly HKG-HND on a given day, I can select CX548 or CX542. CX548 might be more expensive, but there is no way to know that other than selecting both flights one at a time and comparing their prices. Not too bad an issue until you get to selecting a leg of the journey with 10+ options for flights, which could be direct or with a stopover etc. Now, that is one big problem, but another massive issue is that the calendar showing the preceding and following 2 days around the dates selected for each leg has been removed, so there is absolutely no way to know if flying a day earlier or later on a certain leg of the journey might have a large price difference!
Google Flights isn't great for multi-city bookings, and the CX website was always the best way to go, but now that they have removed the auto-selected flights and calendar showing which dates have the cheapest itineraries, they are removing so much useful information from the passengers that it is much more likely for the passenger to go ahead and book a more expensive flight, not knowing that they could save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by selecting a flight a few hours or a day earlier/later than what they were actually booking!
There is a new disclaimer in the multi-city booking page as well; Price will be displayed AFTER selecting all flights. The Modify date(s) page is separate to the one I mentioned in the post, and shows no indication of prices around the selected dates.
For an airline that has aspirations of being the world's best, and "world's greatest service brand", this is sure a massive step in the wrong direction, designed to ensure that the consumer has imperfect information, just so they can go ahead and book a more expensive flight when a much cheaper option was very much bookable, just that they didn't know about it.
I sincerely hope that someone from CX sees this thread and tries to do something about this, because even as a long-time loyal CX customer, this is really frustrating and for the first time in many years I am genuinely considering shifting my flying to another airline that is willing to be transparent and improve usability rather than actively worsening their website.
P.S. The avgeek in me is still livid about CX changing their flight timetable page over a year ago... there is no way to know if a flight is scheduled for operation by an A350-1000 or A350-900 without going for a dummy booking (The website used to indicate 359/351, but now only says "Airbus A350"... ditto for the 777s). That was another crappy decision by the team in charge of the website at CX, removing useful information from customers and making it unnecessarily difficult to access.