I realize nobody here is a fortune teller or psychic by profession (well, probably not) but I wonder if anyone might have any idea at all about how long this problem might last - I'm on the verge of buying a UA/CX RTW trip starting in mid august and ending mid september. I realize there's still some service but it's obviously reduced at this point.

Should I go with the star RTW instead? At this point I can't even book my flights because the travel agent says they won't allow booking europe > hk (which I had already gathered from this forum, but I was stupidly hoping somehow it would work anyway). Could this take a long time? I'm very interested in flying CX for the first time (in J class no less) but I'm decidedly less excited at the prospect of getting stuck somewhere.

thanks.

[This message has been edited by sambailey (edited 07-09-2001).]

So how much excitement do you want in your life? If you go Star you'll probably spend more money but won't have to worry about your ride. If you go CX/UA chances are the seats will continue to be hard to book and even if they break them loose you'll be in constant doubt as to flights actually operating, or being nearly on time.

My crystal ball is all busted up, but it looks like both sides are pretty dug in.

CX has only blocked booking of flights from now till July 23rd. After that, the availability of flights will be okay.

Cathay doesn't anticipate the industrial action to last much longer!

Thanks for the replies...I've been following the story in the SCMP (and in the NY Times today) but as was noted in this forum earlier the SCMP doesn't seem to be the best source on this story - I wish I could read the the chinese language papers. I've been reading the bulletin boards and I guess things don't look so good at present.

But from what it looks like this might take a while...I guess I'll hold off booking for another week or so; I really want to fly CX. If it doesn't work out then I'll be on SQ and Ansett (hardly a bad thing) but I really had my heart set on it.

sambailey,

CX pilots were considered very FF friendly. I have seen posts here where FTers had cockpit visits and great experiences with CX pilots. However, after this job action, if it concludes soon, the nerves may be too raw. I am not sure if your experiences will be all that good. SQ/Ansett may not be a bad choice (even if sometimes higher priced) for the near term.

CX FAs and ground staff have been exemplary though. They may make up for management and pilots if the schedule is back to normal and job action ends.

i was a bit over critical about SCMP
--it is still better than most chinese paper i jsut said they are not the best and one should view it a bit critically

well, journalist in HK are usually not comparable to US/UK. so chinese newspaper are not that good either.
there are a few dozen newspapers (chinese) in town for an ecomony of <7M people, how can you afford a good newspaper?

Maybe one way to look at is calculate how long CX can "survive" the loss this mess incurs. The industrial action cost some 40 million HK dollar every day. According to some analyist, the originally expected revenue for CX for this year was (I think...) somewhere in 3.5 billion range?... (I saw the numbers but forgot already... comments please).

Let's say we start counting from July 5th, (since 3&4th didn't have much distruption, assume not much damage was done). We've already entered the 7th day. 40 million x 7 days = 280 million, which is the cost so far. Then, 3500-280 = 3220 million. Finally, 3220 million / 40 million = 80 days.

Therefore, we should be glad that we will be able to enjoy at most another 80 days of this Mickymouse BS show. Frankly speaking, I don't mind if the management remain stubborn and watch its cash flow slowly draining. Since the managements are also greedy human beings, they wouldn't want to drag this for long, or else their OWN bonus/dividents will be 0 dollars! Not a bad deal, since they've already earned huge bonuses after last year's record profit.



[This message has been edited by fakecd (edited 07-11-2001).]

to be fair, i don't know why people always say that the management got huge bonuses from last year's record profit...again, from their latest annual report, the highest paid director (probably the CEO ?) last year got HK$6.5-7M, around US$800k...and this includes everything already, salary, housing, pension, etc...for comparison, i think a few of the pilots earned more than HK$4M too, and some 500 of these pilots earned HK$2M+...yes, the CEO earned more, but you can't expect all the pilots to get paid the same as the CEO...US$800k for a CEO for such a large company is really nothing IMHO...

[This message has been edited by tedhl (edited 07-11-2001).]