First off, Cathay has neither paid me for this column nor offered any freebies, though I keep looking at my phone waiting sadly. Being a corporate shill is soulless and immoral, but being a failed corporate shill is plain depressing. Can’t somebody just give me a Tesla for writing a good review and we’ll get on with it?
Anyway, Tesla is the most amazing car I’ve ever driven. Cathay is my airline. I used to be a Cathay Diamond member, which meant I flew a lot, but more than that I was the envy of people who worked in finance. In one year, I flew 5 x Singapore, 8 x to Europe, 2 x the US, 2 x Australia and sounded like a huge douchebag every single time I told people that.
I’ve traveled Cathay, United, Delta, Ryan Air, American, Air Canada, Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Malaysian Airlines (eeek!) and those even scarier local Chinese carriers. And the Tesla wins Cathay wins.
If you can choose, fly Cathay.
Airline rankings are generally compiled based on a number of subcategories and an aggregate number. I think that’s pretty dumb. The only thing that matters is service, since everything else is the same.
Observe:
Safety
Any commercial airline you get on is safe, statistically speaking. Like, you’re a billion times more likely to die in a horrible car accident but you don’t go around checking the BAC of your Uber driver before he or she picks you up. Let’s move on.
Food
“This garganelli with pork is so good I’d book Alitalia again just for the meal,” said nobody ever. Airplane food has come on leaps and bounds in the last decade (excluding China where it’s still packaged vomit) but it still can’t transcend the fact that it was frozen somewhere and brought here instead of cooked in the kitchen by a chef. What people actually say about airline food – “wow, that’s not too bad” – doesn’t move the needle.
Aircraft
Economy is rough. It sucks. No matter what you do, it will suck unless the airline offers more legroom and reclining seats and calls it “business” and quintuples the price.
Business is either acceptable or not. Flat bed = I can justify this price. Non-flat bed = why am I paying HKD40,000 for a broken massage chair.
Customs
Everyone has to go through this. If you go biz you can get into the EasyPass line, which is sometimes a little bit shorter, unless you end up behind a bunch of African Immigrants in a western European country, in which case load up Candy Crush because we’re going to be here a while.
Anyway, this isn’t controlled by the airline.
Service
Yes, Service! Service is where we’re going to make a difference, because when you’re dealing with tired, stressed out, confused, scared, angry, drunk people, you have to keep your cool. Cathay does this better than most.
The flight attendants are nice and show up if you push the button (you’d think this wouldn’t be high on the list, but you also didn’t fly my last United flight); they give you lots of water and tell you if you’ve missed the meal but they’ve saved something for you. The ground staff knows what’s going on (I know, weird, right?) and in the event they don’t, they can figure out by calling someone.
Through my flying life, I find the “pissed-off ground staff” the rule not the exception – a 45-year-old offers snappy answers and keeps telling calm people to “calm down” so many times that they lose the calmness they started with and go insane. I’m sure these poor people have been yelled at, told they’re incompetent, and deal with customers constantly asking them the same dumb questions – but, you know, so what? Personally, I don’t really care.
Your job is to offer good service to customers with a smile and calmness when the whole world is falling down around you. And in the airline business, if the whole world isn’t falling down around you it’s probably a Sunday and you’re off work.
On my last trip I watched the woman at the gate yell at three different people who only wanted to know when the flight would take off. She then took an impromptu 30-minute break as we stood there, dumbfounded. And I kept thinking, “Man, if this were Cathay, somebody would explain the problem and give us a bottle of water or something.”
So with my complimentary Evian, I salute you Cathay, for better service than the others. We’re pretty good at service in HK in general: we work hard, we work fast, and even if it’s not the most efficient or most intelligent in process, we always try our absolute best.
Yalun Tu is a writer based in Hong Kong. He wrote The Straight Man column for HK Magazine, and TV scripts for HBO Asia, Channel V, and Fox Movies Premium. You can contact him at yalun.tu@gmail.com or @yaluntu on Twitter.
