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Flying with Air China Over Ten Years, Let me Tell you about its Service Today

Flying with Air China Over Ten Years, Let me Tell you about its Service Today

Old Aug 22, 2018, 3:31 am
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Join Date: Jul 2018
Location: Anhui, China
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Posts: 19
Flying with Air China Over Ten Years, Let me Tell you about its Service Today

The author: Mr.Zhang, the Service Executive of CAPSE



Airline: Air China
Flight: CA981
Route: Beijing (PEK) – New York (JFK)
Class: Business
Aircraft Type: Boeing 747-89L
Reg.: B2485
Age: 3.7 years
Flight Distance: 10971km
Take-off: 13:58
Arrival at: 14:35
Flight time: 12 hour and 36 minutes
Seat Configuration: F12C54W66Y233

Greetings to you all,

I have flown with Air China for over ten years. Honestly, its service on various routes is uneven.

This time I took a flight to North America. Usually, Air China operates the North America routes with chief aircrafts like Boeing 747 or Boeing 777-300ER. Of course, Boeing 787 has joined the flying team now.



The flight attendants only offered four kinds of welcome drinks for boarding travelers, including water, champagne, tomato juice and orange juice, but without snacks. Also, the introduction regarding cabin seat and in-flight entertainment was so poor, and just a few flight attendants introduced themselves.



In my opinion, no matter the appearance, English speaking or services, the cabin crews on Air China's Beijing – Shanghai route and long-haul routes from Beijing were more excellent than others.



Except for economy class, at least the flight attendants for both first class and business class on North America routes were selected and well-trained, so their overall qualities were better than others, such as their courtesy and helpfulness, language performance as well as English broadcast service.

I thought that the cabin broadcast offered on flights to Shanghai was the best, while Southwest Branch of Air China offered the worst cabin broadcast service, neither foreign travelers nor Chinese passengers could understand what they were saying.

Cabin Facilities:



The Business Class of B747-89L featured 2 different variants of layout: 2-2 for the upper cabin and 2-2-2 for the lower cabin.

My seat on CA981 flight was 80A, a left window seat in the first row on the upper cabin.



Most business class seats of Air China's large aircrafts were the same type, which adopted the non-flammable cloth with good materials, so their quality was usually decent. But your phone or other things were easy to drop into the existing gaps on both sides of the seat.





Compared with other airlines' seats, there were small storage areas, and the privacy was slightly bad.





Air China had been using this kind of amenity kits for years, it seemed inferior in quality and grade.







The choices of newspapers and magazines were really not rich, and even English magazines were not available.

Cabin Crew Service:

Except for the above disadvantages, the flight attendants service on this flight was almost perfect. Every flight attendant was friendly and helpful, and paid more attention to business class passengers during the whole flight.



But, they didn't offer pajamas for business class travelers any more. Now they only offered pajamas and turn-down service for first class travelers on long-haul routes.

Food & Beverages:









As for in-flight meals, I ordered my first meal on Air China's website prior to departure. The choices for in-flight meals were abundant to select.





The starters were served with Smoked Salmon, Salami and mixed nuts. And it would be better if the nuts was heated. My coffee was made by the coffee machine in the downstairs first class. The taste of desserts was just plain.



The in-flight catering of Air China was incomparable with these best airlines, like Singapore Airlines, Japan Airlines, ANA and Emirates, their meals were really wonderful and delicious. Cathay Pacific also did this well before.

But, maybe because of the cost control, Air China's in-flight meals both in First and Business Class were really worse than before. I thought that cutting costs was understandable, and Cathay Pacific also had the same problems.

Overall, the whole fight experience was not bad.

Suggestions for Air China:

1. The toilet on this flight was really dirty, I thought that it was not acceptable that appeared in the Business Class, behind the cockpit (The first one on the upper cabin).

2. The luggage tags should be pasted better at check-in counters. As my priority tag was dropped, I didn’t enjoy the Priority Baggage service in JFK. So, my luggage was delivered together with economy passengers', I waited a long time and had to be almost the last one to get my bag at last.


CAPSE, an independent third-party civil aviation service evaluation institution in China.
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