Twelve Dollars & Twelve Years Later
On the world's best airline and what is left of it
I was waiting to board a train at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station in August 2014 when I received a call from my friend who used to live in Hong Kong. I picked up, since there was no logical reason he would be calling me at half past seven in the morning unless it was something urgent. Upon answering, he asked me if I was sitting down. I told him I was just about to go to the bathroom and was trying to decide between the squatting toilet or the western one, so that was yet to be decided. He went on to tell me that Cathay Pacific was releasing a promotion at eight o’clock to celebrate winning Skytrax’s World’s Best Airline award for the fourth time. The drop, he said, was 2,014 round-trip business class or premium economy tickets at $100 HKD or about twelve dollars each, and he would text me the link.
My train to Hefei for a business meeting was departing just after the sale opened, so I knew if I was to have any chance, I would have to enter the site right away. I milled by the gates waiting to board, and as the clock ticked down, I tried pulling up the link. Sure enough, there were flights to Sydney, New York, and London in premium economy for $100 HKD and to cities like Osaka and Bangkok for the same in business class. At 8 am, as I descended an escalator to board the high-speed rail that would ferry me across the flatlands east of Shanghai, the sale went live, and after clicking to purchase was greeted with a message that the page was not available. This, however, was a common occurrence behind China’s great firewall and in an era of 3G and 4G signals. Not knowing what it was, I turned on my VPN, which was set to the United States, and got the same message. As I sat in my window seat on the train, dejected, I had one final thought and changed my VPN to Hong Kong. The page opened.
As the train that would ferry me at close to three hundred kilometers an hour pulled out of the station, I feverishly typed in information knowing full well the signal would soon break between towers or within tunnels. I found the one I had been targeting: Sydney, for dates in November when I happened to know my uncle and cousin would be traveling there. As the sprawl of Shanghai sped past, the page reloaded to display a confirmation message. In November, I would fly to Sydney on the best airline in the world, and it had only cost me twelve dollars.
I then spent the rest of the train ride to Hefei figuring out how to explain to my employer that I would need an additional week off in November
Cathay Pacific never won the top spot again. After 2014, the award rotated among the usual names: Qatar, Emirates, and Singapore Airlines. A few years later I moved from Shanghai, and Cathay Pacific had become just the airline I told my story about rather than something I flew. In 2019, amid the upheaval that consumed Hong Kong that summer, Cathay lost its CEO. Months later, COVID arrived, and the airline cut a quarter of its workforce and shut down Cathay Dragon, its regional subsidiary that was often my carrier from Shanghai to Hong Kong, after 35 years. To my surprise last year, Cathay had climbed back to third in Skytrax.
Last week, I flew Cathay again.
The problems began before we departed for the airport. Upon check-in 48 hours before departure, despite being new Cathay members, we were unable to check-in early, pick our seats, or assign our membership to our booking as we were told by the online agent it was impossible to use our membership on the booking until they have verified that I was, in fact, a human. Frustrated, I told my wife it was ok: check-in opened 24 hours prior for everyone, even us androids. My attempt the next day got me slightly further until I was greeted by errors and bold red fonts that indicated that I was trying to do something they absolutely would not allow. I once again got on the chat feature with an online agent and politely explained that we are flexible people, stressing the fact that we were indeed people and that if they could just confirm an aisle/middle anywhere on the aircraft we’d handle the rest at the airport. Naturally, the agent explained to me they had a better solution, and that was to divide the guests in the booking up and seat us randomly around the plane.
At Heathrow, after boarding but before take off, I asked the man who was sitting in the aisle next to my wife if he minded switching; I had ultimately gotten into a nice aisle myself, so the trade was fair and was eagerly made. The plane pushed back 25 minutes late, taxied to the runway, and then stopped. The pilot came on and announced we had a technical fault and would be brought back to the gate. Once we had returned, he came back on to add in his same measured tone that Heathrow had a curfew of 11:30 pm, and so if the plane was not fixed by 11:10 pm we would not fly. It was not resolved, and we deplaned into an empty terminal, taken back through immigration, collected our bags, and put onto buses and driven to a nearby hotel. Which I did while simultaneously trying to coordinate with the hotel to allow our other family who was inbound on another flight to still check in under my name. At 3 am our heads finally hit a pillow.
Calling what followed a slow drip of information would be too complimentary. Having heard that breakfast would be at 9, we roused ourselves to eat and returned to the room. In the app, it showed our flight had been rescheduled for the same time at 7 pm. Then, a half hour later, we were rebooked completely on a route that would make a 12-hour nonstop now 20 hours via Kuala Lumpur, departing at 9:30 pm, and cost us two days. I called Cathay, and the lady assured me that not only was there nothing else possibly available to get to Hong Kong even outside of their alliance, but she could also give us the most random seats possible on Malaysia Airlines.
It was around this time my wife began referring to them as Cathay Horrific.
Given the later departure, I called the front desk and asked how late check-out could be extended to and was told not only that check-out was in 10 minutes, but lunch had started, and so if we wanted to eat we should go down. In fact, there would be a representative for Cathay Pacific there who would update us all. We never saw or heard from another representative from Cathay Pacific again. When the buses did arrive, they had been instructed by Cathay to take us not to the airport but to another hotel, which took an additional thirty minutes to sort out. After languishing at the airport for six and a half hours, we boarded our flight to Kuala Lumpur.
This first leg was now 14 hours, but I had at least secured seats together from the gate agent. Seated next to us in our row of three was a lady with two lap infants. We wedged ourselves in as I speculated wildly as to how this was going to work. Eventually, her husband came and collected the younger child and left to go to another part of the plane. They had been split up too. I offered to swap our middle but they had the bassinet in the other seat so could not give it up. The staff or others in that row found inconveniencing themselves unnecessary. The child who remained could not have been more than a month from turning two, which is the limit for a lap infant. The child was so big that the flight staff checked her passport again before take off. I had been only slightly dejected to now be flying during the World Cup final rather than watching it over dim sum, but the child next to us kicked my wife, me, and the seat in front of her like she was playing in it.
We landed at Kuala Lumpur and sat on the tarmac for another hour waiting for a gate to clear while she got in a few more. By 3 am, two days later than we were due to arrive, our heads finally hit a pillow in Hong Kong.
In 2014 I bought a twelve-dollar ticket to Sydney with 3G and a VPN and considered myself to be at the top of my travel game. Writing this, I realize how little of that story was actually about me. Cathay was just a great airline with great systems. I know far more about travel now than I did then, but none of it matters if the airline on the other end is a shell of what it was. 🛬
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Enshittification comes for everything eventually...
These tales stink when they happen to you - but man, they're fun to read about, especially when we can empathise. I've been there, not with Cathay, but with other airlines and their rebooking/cancellation shenanigans. I remember a tight call for one flight taking off late at night for Lagos, we were mere minutes from the curfew and I had to be on the ground the next morning (otherwise my boss would have castrated me I fear). We got lucky that time.