#2 out of 94 Airlines A minimum of 10 flight-reports within the past two years is required to appear in the rankings.
510 reviews
Disclaimer: this trip was taken AFTER Covid in 2023.
Post-covid Cathay – something not touched upon that frequently (or not at all?) on flight-report.com
I have always been very interested in taking Cathay after covid. It has always made me proud as a Hong-Konger but sadly, more and more stories of their service declining (even before covid) appeared on the internet. This Seoul trip (ie. my first trip after Covid) worked perfectly with CX's tickets and we only paid 4800 HKD per person for an economy round-trip ticket. Compared to Hong Kong Airlines (HX), CX charged about the same price but came with 1x23kg of free checked bag per person, IFE, full meals and a chance to take my favourite plane, the A350.
Before departure though, CX's largest cabin crew union announced that they would work to rule due to the terrible treatment offered by the CX management team. We got pretty scared even though CX reassured us that all flights would go normally.
Even though we were used to getting to the airport last minute, we decided to arrive earlier for our first flight post-Covid. We arrived at the airport around 100 minutes before departure at 12:30. Thankfully, there was no wait as opposed to the morning rush hours with extremely long check-in queues.
We successfully got our boarding passes and proceeded airside, excitedly, for our first flight in 1298 days.
Airside was pretty quiet with only a few dozen flights leaving in the coming hours.
We took the opportunity to visit the Skybridge, a new bridge opened in 2022. It connected the North Satellite terminal, previously separated and only accessible by bus, to the main terminals. The gates 501-510 have also been renumbered to 13-22 as the 5xx gates represent gates requiring a bus to reach.
The glass floor allows for easy spotting of planes passing underneath the bridge. It can even fit an A380 (although I'm pretty sure there are only 2 A380 services per day to HK rn)
I took the opportunity to spot some planes. From left to right, we have China Airlines' A321neo (which just started to fly into HKG when I took this trip), CX's 77W and BR's 787 (forgot which variant it was)
Malaysian A330 at Gate 12 going to KUL! Interesting to see how it was being loaded with CX Catering trucks.
In the background, more CX birds and an ANA 787 heading to HND
2 SQ planes in the same frame (1 787-10 taxiing to the runway and 1 77W parked at Gate 5)! Not that rare considering SQ has 2-3 afternoon flights leaving HKG
Not long later, I made my way to Gate 2, one of the closest gates to security for boarding. My ride today will be B-LRC, a 6 year old A350. In fact, this plane also operated one of the last flights I took pre-covid (my CX759 flight to Singapore was on this plane!)
Boarding soon started and after one last look of the registration, we made our way and boarded the plane.
Did I mention how much I love these fancy LCD panels above the gates?
My seat for today is 60H, an aisle seat. Row 60 is the 2nd row of the back economy cabin and the window seat, 60K, is also an extra legroom seat. We selected 1 extra legroom seat for free due to Cathay status. Nevertheless, the regular seats feature 32 inches of pitch, enough for most grown-ups and I enjoyed ample legroom for my flight. These seats feature 18 inches of width but the bulkhead/extra legroom seats feature less due to the armrest containing a PTV and tray table.
The seat comes with a cup holder, tablet holder which comes in a openable compartment.
The IFE was not turned on yet and was still showing old arrival information of the previous flight B-LRC operated the day before.
This is where the cabin starts to show its age. Look at this safety card :/
and the rusty nails holding the tray table. Thankfully it didnt fall off mid-flight.
Anyway, the captain came on and announced that due to a technical problem with the plane, we would have to be delayed by around 15-20 minutes.
We ended up pushing back at 14:30 and followed by an extremely short taxi (around 2 minutes), we left HKG.
The IFE was also switched on after the safety video. It had a lot of movies and TV shows even though the 11.1 inch screen was a bit low res for me. Their newest A321neos now feature 4K screens. The IFE on this plane was also extremely laggy, which was a disappointment.
Interactive flight math from flightpath3D! Really enjoyed moving it around and using all those functions.
I ended up watching Iron Man 2 while falling asleep midway 3 times. Not a good movie in my opinion (1 is a lot better!)
Anyways, the IFE on this particular plane needed some maintenance. The lady across the aisle in 60G reported no audio from the audio jack and my mum in 60J also had faulty audio. My seat was slightly better but I kept encountering static noises from my headphones. Speaking of headphones, they were uncomfortable and kept falling off. I understand that the A350s were/are still the backbone of their fleet during Covid times when they grounded all of their 777s and most of the A330s but they could at least repair some faulty IFEs ight?
Mood lighting was on towards the end of the flight as we approach darkness. I like how this plane had seatbelt signs on the rooftop, as well as the toilet icons showing whether the toilet is occupied or not. Red for locked, green for empty.
I visited the toilet later. It was smaller than what I recalled and was pretty dirty, sadly. However, right after I came out, the crew immediately went in and sanitised the whole toilet and cleaned it thoroughly with alcohol and towels.
Here comes the part where I was most excited and looking forward to. Since Covid, many airlines have reduced their service offerings and I was curious to see if CX did the same.
Even though the cabin crew was implementing work-to-rule policies, they were fairly quick in action. I received my meal around 1 hour and 15 minutes after takeoff. It consisted of Pork rice, fruit, a bun and some Haggen-dazs ice cream. I went with apple juice for my drink.
The meal was pretty decent for an airplane meal even though the rice was a bit mushy. The chicken and sauce were absolutely delicious. The cold bread was disgusting but the ice cream (vanila) definitely made up for it. I also appreciated how Cathay offered metal cultery, an upgrade compared to Pre-covid.
Unfortunately, only 1 round of drinks were offered with the meal. The cabin crew didnt specify whether hot drinks were available. Before covid, Cathay used to also offer a round of peanuts and drinks before the main meal.
After the meal service, we were approximately halfway through the flight.
The crew were friendly at all times and even though some online reported them being exhausted, I didn't notice that at all. They had smiles on their faces and treated passengers kindly. I was particularly impressed by how they were still able to remain such an attitude especially when being mistreated by their employer.
Another point to add is that there was an unusually high rate of foreign language-speaking crew on this flight. The ISM was Malaysian but she was also pretty fluent in Mandarin. I only noticed 2 HK crew on the whole plane with the majority of the crew being Korean. I did wish that there could be a bit more HK crew on the flight but sometimes foreign crew tend to be more friendly towards customers.
Even though we departed 30 minutes behind schedule, we only arrived 3 minutes late thanks to strong tailwinds.
Immigration was painfully slow as out of the 24 available counters, only 5 were open. Plus, all passengers from Mainland China, Macau and Hong Kong were instructed to only use Concourse D, which resulted in passport checks taking 1 hour. Incheon could definitely do better in terms of crowd management and I think that opening 5 counters to serve a full A350 as well as more widebodies from other gates is simply not acceptable.
Anyways, we cleared immigration and saw our bags already waiting on the floor, which was pretty fast compared to immigration.
We took the AREX express into the city to begin our skiing trip in Korea. Tourism bonus will be in my return flight's review!
Overall, it was a pleasant 3 hour flight to Seoul. I enjoyed the IFE, food and the service. However, CX should really invest in maintenance of their planes and cleanliness as well.
I felt happy realising that CX's quality didn't drop too much/at all after the Covid pandemic and wish to see them become better once again.
Les contributeurs de Flight-Report ont posté 25 avis concernant 6 compagnies sur la ligne Hong Kong (HKG) → Seoul (ICN).
La compagnie qui obtient la meilleure moyenne est Cathay Pacific avec 8.4/10.
La durée moyenne des vols est de 3 heures et 17 minutes.
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4 Comments
Some cost cutting is evident, like the pre-flight drinks and snacks and obviously less thorough cabin cleaning, but hopefully it is temporary and CX will bounce back. They were so close to going under during the pandemic and it seemed that everything was against them, so I'm just happy they survived!
Thanks for sharing!
I do understand that CX's executives would like to earn the most out of their crew especially after the past 2 years but keeping them constantly working for 21 days is simply sad (before the removal of hotel quarantine in HK). I did realise that the pilots and crew did not really get off after this flight. My guess is that they would do another run back to HKG (didn't really speak to them as they were quite stressed in the back galley packing stuff) as I did see some trolleys labelled CX419 for the return flight that day. Back in the days they would probably get a day off in Seoul and be able to spend it in the city centre, but with so little crew, I guess it's no longer feasible.
As a HKer, I was fairly confident that the HK government would keep them afloat as our flag carrier but their financial situation has really been a bit frightening over these years. As for whether CX would bounce back or not, I think it'll take at least a few years for them to recover as they only promise to operate 100% of the pre-covid schedule in late 2024 and beyond. I do wish that they could learn a thing or two from KA, such as proactively offering hot drinks (something I experienced back in 2014 from HKG to PEK, a similar lengthed flight). The situation with the toilet is rather disappointing as not many passengers used the toilet in reality (perhaps due to Covid? HKers are still pretty scared about it)
One thing to add is that CX has been using A350-900s almost exclusively for short-haul flights and while they offer a better product than the older A330s, they're a bit of a waste and I am really curious as to how CX would schedule their planes on different routes post-covid.
I do hope that CX will become a popular option for transit once again but I do agree that will only change if they actually ramp up their frequencies once again. Thanks for stopping by!
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