Cathay ground handling a big zero?
 

After years of considering them the perfect airline, this time around I've found what seems like a huge gap - zero ground support when you need it.

We met them from BA at DXB the other day, and needed b/p's and baggage. At the transit desk, you'd swear they didn't fly there. Finally grabbed a local who told me to go stand in the nondescript general line. We got handled, got bp's, but one of our bags didn't make it. Three days later it's still bouncing around between the Middle East and Europe. No reply from CX, but Thai here is being a bit helpful. Some obvious CX ground staff at DXB would probably have made the problem not happen, as we were late inbound wasted half an hour.

Inbound to BKK, CX was almost an hour late. Not their fault, the airport closed due to "VIP movement" and we made ovals in the sky for a long time. But no one met pax, no one asked about cnx. No CX personnel anywhere visible. So we missed our onward. Someone in bag claim area said Thai handled them. Otherwise that was a big secret too. So we filed our missing bag (ex DXB) with them, they called our onward carrier, etc. Again, the absolute zero of CX personnel or any evidence of them was a huge negative to me.

But the inflight people continue to be well trained.

CX doesn't always have their own staff at all airports. BKK is one sore point as all ground arrangements are handled by THAI airways staff and CX only has a skeleton crew handling major stuff. I would think that DXB would be handled by EK staff too and hence the bureaucracy.

I've had my bags go missing in London and Paris, which the ground handling is by by American Airlines. They're just as useless as BKK. They have no tracking system (which I have no comment on)... and in the end it was British Airways who came to the rescue in BOTH cases.

CX of course at HKG is good. But that's their home port.. I have to admit that I find SQ staff generally better trained though to handle emergencies.

Pretty much every airline will be weak outside of the destinations it most frequently flies to (eg DXB for CX). And since transit desks are usually staffed by the dominant ground handling company and clump a whole group of airlines together, the DXB experience speaks more of the ground handling company's incompetence rather than CX's.

But given the number of daily flights CX have through BKK their ground ops does sound a little shabby from the OP's recount - I thought it was SOP for any airline to at least have either their own rep or the handling staff meet a flight?

Best ground staff so far... AKL and HKG :)

Whenever you fly an airline ex-DXB that is not EK, the ground handling will be very poor. The F check-in area for EK is very nice.

All the ground handling for "other carriers" is done by a company called DNATA (forgot what it stands for, but I think they are affiliated with EK in some way). They can't even print bag tags or boarding passes on the bag/tagboarding pass stock of the airlines they handle and have to use their own "generic" stuff. Also, for flights ex-DXB (don't know if this is still the case now), E-tickets cannot be used as the DNATA staff can't access the various carrier's E-ticket databases from their Departure Control System.

The DNATA staff are so poorly trained that they can't even tell the difference between "date of issue", and "date of expiry" on my passport! They thought my passport has expired long ago when it wasn't!

DXB is a special case; airlines are not permitted to have their own transfer desks (I presume you were in transit BA to CX from your description) and their is a generic service that does the transfer for all airlines. This is a very substandard service and is chaotic at best, with long lines and no knowledge or interest. So the problem isn't CX, it is DXB (I think mandated by the gov't, which also happens to own EK which doesn't have this problem in their terminal). I happened to talk to the BA station manager a year ago and the topic of hidden competitive factors came up, which gave me an earful of the onerous restrictions that they face at DXB all designed to make competition just a bit tougher (and EK that much more attractive).

I've had the opposite experience recently (but not at DXB). CX came to my rescue twice to ensure that my bags got onto the right plane-- once at LAX after having been mislabeled by AA staff at the start of the trip (they seemed to be on the radio to the baggage room for a long time), and then recently at SIN, where they were able to track down my bag during a 50 minute transfer there from a Qantas flight, to the point of coming to me at the gate to assure me that they had found the bag and put it on the plane. I've had bags lost before, but in both recent cases, it seemed above and beyond the call of duty, so......

Maybe, and God help me for saying this, CX is becoming "westernized".

* Smaller food portions
* Pre-plating in J
* Diminishing ground support
* and on and on .....

Yep, smells like a westernization. Bit by bit. Seen it all before.

And what does this have to do with ground handling????

Well, if CX is good here, bad there, so-so another place, that's damnation enough for an airline of their lofty status to merit a comment. Which is all I meant to do.

UAE/Emirates no doubt deserves bashing, bad on them for such a poor transit desk. But at least BA somehow had gotten a big sign up over one of the windows, and iirc other airlines had as well. Although perhaps no one ever transits to CX there, having a staffer (or a native with a CX armband) in the area of the transit desk during a period they had a couple of departures would have been the least I would have expected.

Similarly, with a flight almost an hour late inbound to BKK, there was no excuse not to make an attempt to look after their pax. Even third-world carriers like AA often make a strong attempt at sorting things out.

Nor should it have been a secret that Thai handles them in BKK.

One of three bags failed to be picked up and put on Cathay out of DXB during the transit. Thai handled the repatriation in a friendly but somewhat helpless fashion, more than willing to tell us where in the world the bag had gotten to (London, at the farthest) but apparently powerless to do anything about it. And for whatever reason, Cathay apparently was not interested in posting the bag on any carrier but themselves - it eventually arrived on their 4x-weekly service through BOM, though obviously Thai themselves flies the route non-stop regularly. And CX so far has ignored my emailed inquiry.

They're still likely to maintain their crown as the best carrier overall, and they'll still find my butt happily in their seats, but as a poster mentioned, one could imagine that we'll have too many opportunities to reminisce about "the way they used to be."

Perhaps it's good for CX to learn a little of SQ's entics.

See this thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=346115