Hell no. theres a reason QR serves this route double daily. CX has no firepower to spare on secondary destinations that has fierce competition. This route I can bet is probably more for transit as well, and QR probably serves it as a OW agreement between the two.

This route should be a transit one, fitting QR's business model and hard for CX to compete.

Unless changed recently, QR leases CX's 773s to operate the HKG-DOH. Focusing on the J cabin, the hard product from the lounge to the seat is identical for this route. The only difference is the soft product on board where QR excels. You get a nicer amenity kit, PJs, and dine-on-demand with better alcohol. I see no reason why J Flyers would pick CX over QR for this route.

put all product things aside, this is clearly a transit flight - maybe for example PHL to HKG or Africa-HKG or Texas-HKG, whatsoever. In that case, what good does it do for CX to fly here?

I agree, don't think there is a huge demand for 40 degrees heat, yet.

BA and QF both fly LHR-DOH but they have codeshares to destinations such as BKK.

Budapest got a lot of secondary Chinese city flights in 2023, I believe at one point they had more weekly Mainland China flights than the entirety of USA!

For Brisbane in particular, I'd actually argue they're following the subsidies, rather than the competition ;)

Whatever it takes to get people in the door for the 2032 Olympics, eh?

please elaboate

do you mean CX is flocking back to BNE cuz others are? (but SEA isnt). i beg to differ but SEA and BNE is very teo different type of destination. i fly yo BNE every 4weeks so i know somewhat what i am talking about.

Belt and Road is the main reason many of us have been predicting Budapest for CX, only somewhat tongue in cheek.

First of all Budapest is heavily subsidized for political reasons. Secondly I think its rather a US-too-less-flights issue rather than a huge amount of budapest flights.

Certainly it's the USA's fault (and Russian Airspace by extension), and Orban's gov't is certainly subsidizing 'em, just thought it was wild given Hungary's population of 9Mil, and USA's... 300Mil+? Not to mention the economic disparity between the two, ofc

What China-US route (during the 350 slot pair days) was remotely close to as silly as NGB-BUD?

From before the pandemic: JFK to… Fuzhou?!?!? on Xiamen Airlines?!?!?

SFO to Qingdao always struck me as particularly useless

The USA destination city always made sense tho, typically one of LAX/JFK/SFO, maybe Seattle

no cx flew to BNE since a very long time ago, its just CX knows how to avoid over saturated markets and focus on monopoly routes (such as HKG-JFK being 3 daily now as competition is much less and cathay gets to fly over russia)

Airlines like HU and MF have to settle for whatever BJS and SHA city pairs CA and MU don't want (they obviously do want LAX, NYC, SFO, but they don't care so much about BOS, SEA, HNL) OR routes to important markets from China tier 2 cities (so MF can fly to LAX or NYC, but its choices are quite limited on the China side).

What sets the BUD routes apart from these is that you have insignificant cities on both ends.

With that in mind, please share any relevant examples that you know of.

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but the launch of HKG-DOH with Aria suites, may get QR deploy q suites planes to HKG, like what they now doing with SIN route

How about Cathay resuming HKG - SEA / EWR / DFW ?

they can't
HKG is not longer the city it used to be and CX is a tarnished brand.

Of course most people on here think that Budapest and Riyadh are more lucrative than SEA, EWR and DFW.

But basic stats like, Income per capita, % of expats, GDP and other airlines are all ignored cause clearly all other airlines are foolish .
as I have said before expect direct flights to random cities as CX can't compete effectively anymore to economic power house cities and is bleeding market share.

If the QF and NZ management were competing against the current CX executives back in the early 2000s they would have never even left the LHR route.

used to be 4 daily.
And had at least 3 first class flights daily.

Also had a daily EWR flight.
And a 4 weekly flight to DC.