Saturday, July 05, 2008

Gah

Haven't posted in a while. Been really lazy lately.

I'll try to post a bit on my trip, but I really should be starting off by basically complaining about China Eastern.

The whole fiasco started with my friend JH realizing that China Eastern had actually postponed our flight by 2 days. We had bought really cheap tickets from a travel agency for a Singapore to New York flight via China Eastern. It was supposed to take us from Singapore to Shanghai, switching to a connecting flight from there to New York. China Eastern has apparently postponed the Shanghai-New York flight by 2 days without informing us.

We panicked. We didn't want to spend 2 days in Shanghai. So we called both the travel agency and China Eastern to seek a resolution. They both pushed the blame to each other, neither wanting to admit it was their fault. Well, it had to be someones right?

I had to ask to be let off early from work to make my way down to the travel agency to get an answer from them. China Eastern had actually stopped picking up our calls and taken the phone off the hook, meaning we couldn't call them. The travel agency wasn't much help, so I rushed down to the China Eastern head office. Some how they were closed at 4.30pm. We headed down to the airport in hopes that the counter there would be open. It wasn't, only opening at night. It was so frustrating and worrying since we had a very short deadline to get things done.

To cut a very long story short, it was only on the day that we were supposed to fly that they traced down the fault to China Eastern. China Eastern was claiming that they had sent out notices that the flights were canceled. However, it was finally realized that they had sent out the notices after we had bought the tickets and more importantly, they did not send it out to people who had already bought the tickets for that day, i.e. US.

It ended rather happily as they had to send us on the next available plane to New York which was Singapore Airlines.

Unfortunately, we were going to come back to Singapore via China Eastern.

Comparing the 2, it was really sad. The difference in the quality and quantity and frequency of the food was amazing.

SQ left me feeling very very full. I was perpetually hungry on China Eastern. The China Eastern blanket was too small, only allowing me to either cover my upper body or lower body and not both at the same time.

Summary, I'm not inclined to take China Eastern ever again, no matter how cheap the tickets are.

3 comments:

Mark said...

Dude!!! I need to hear a blow-by-blow account of your experience in Nova Scotia!! I saw your team on the GPS tracking page. Did you hear me screaming for you? I'm so glad you made it and I'm anxious to hear what it was like for you.

CrazyUnicyclist said...

Thanks for the interest. I'm _still_ in the process of getting my pics and videos uploaded and will write more about RTL when I get them all up.

Anonymous said...

The all-wise JH will say

I TOLD YOU SO.

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