China Eastern. Why bother??
I travel in and out of China regularly transferring at Guangzhou and then on to Kunming with China Southern Airlines. For reasons I won’t bore you with I was forced make changes to my usual pattern and ended up having to use China Eastern, transferring to a domestic flight at shanghai. I should have arrived at Kunming around midnight, but due to ‘unspecified delays’ at Shanghai, didn’t clear Kunming airport till well after 4:00am. The person meeting me had been waiting for over 5 HOURS, the bus service had finished so we paid a minivan driver 200 CNY to take us, with baggage into the city.
Return flight to Sydney was even worse.
Left Kunming on time, but with China Eastern there is a 6 hour wait at Shanghai for a connecting flight, so my travel agent got me to transfer at Nanjing instead, should have been only a 3 hour wait – BIG MISTAKE – Nanjing isn’t set up for proper international transfers, so you have to unload your baggage at Nanjing, exit the domestic terminal and go through the booking process again at the international check in. And guess what, China Eastern has different rules as regards baggage on domestic and international flights, so I ended up having to abandon an oversized item I was bringing back for a friend at Nanjing airport.
The officious supervisors at the China Eastern check in counter weren’t interested in the fact that I had booked the baggage in at their Kunming counter knowing full well that I was flying on to Sydney. These are your usual bottom of the ladder admin types, only interested ‘the established procedure’ than in fulfilling their obligation of carriage or customer satisfaction. When I asked for the form for making written complaints they tried to connect me to a complaints hotline that only accepted complaints made in Chinese.
The kicker was that the flight on to Sydney was delayed 2 1/2 hours for ‘unspecified reasons’, so didn’t even get the shorter wait time anticipated.
Had another friend flying with China Eastern ended up having to stay in Shanghai overnight after missing her plane to Sydney due to more delays.
I will in future be making every effort to avoid flying with China Eastern Airways or transferring via Shanghai and Nanjing.
