Flight Review: Cathay Pacific HK-LAX 12 hrs - Premium Economy

Who:  Me, Daisy (3.5 y), Sky (1y) and Husband
What:  Cathay Pacific CX 884/5 Hong Kong - Los Angeles

Cathay have recently introduced their Premium Economy seats on selected routes.  On our recent US roadtrip, we decided to pay the extra on our 12 hour (15 hrs on return) flight to LAX.  I often wonder if it's worth paying the extra but in Cathay's instance, I would say yes.

Pre-check In
Some advice - hassle both your travel agent and the airline to make sure you are seated together and if you have a baby, seated in the bulkhead.  A week in advance of my trip, I called my travel agent and discovered that we weren't all sat together.  I am fed up of this happening, I don't understand why airlines can't allocate families to sit together on booking?  I decided not to let this stress me out as long as one of my 3 seats was in the bulkhead, surely at check-in or onboard people would swap with us....

Check In
As my husband is a Marco Polo Gold member, we used the Business class check in (there is also designated Premium Economy Check In).  The check in assistant wasn't that helpful. He couldn't get us seated together but promised we did have one bulkhead seat.  Unfortunately when we got on the plane, we realised that was not the case....

Boarding
Premium Economy can board first with Business & Marco Polo members although I do find with small kids, they'll often give you priority boarding regardless of class

Onboard
Premium Economy is sandwiched in between Business and Economy and takes up about 6 rows. On our 777, the configuration was 2-4-2.
Seats are noticeably larger and allow you to move them quite far back.  As in Business, you get served drinks before take off.
Surprise surprise, our 1 allocated bulkhead seat (the other 2 seats were in the row behind) had no bassinet table in front of it.  Luckily some kind passengers agreed to swap around.  However, having paid extra for Premium Economy and also being Gold Marco Polo, I do find this unacceptable that the check in staff were inept at ensuring that the only baby in the Premium Economy section had the bassinet seat.  Rant over.
The Cathay entertainment system was excellent with a varied selection for adults & kids.  You also get the Business Class noise cancelling headphones (useful for cancelling our your toddler).

 Bigger seats in Premium Economy

 Don't forget to pre-order your child's meal.  This was spaghetti with meatballs.  Quite a lot of sugar in the meal although I did confiscate the Snickers before she saw it.

We just about squashed our 10.5kg one year old in the Bassinet. 

 

Premium Economy passengers receive a small pack by Goods of Desire containing eyemask, earplugs, toothbrush and socks.

My toddler was also given a Cathay Kids pack with lots of stickers.

Ideas for weekend away from HK: Seoul Part 1- hotel & flights

My friend Franny has just come back from her minibreak to Seoul, South Korea with her 2 kids and here's her trip report.  It's fairly detailed so I'm splitting it in 2 posts:

While it wasn’t top of my list for a weekend break from Hong Kong with two kids, my brother has been living in Seoul for 4 years now and our excuse for not visiting him of having two small boys is wearing a bit thin (especially as we will quite happily skip down to Malaysia or Thailand on a whim).

So we took a four-day break the first weekend in June. 


BOOKING
We flew with Cathay, and although there were Cathay hotel deals available, we found booking a hotel separately worked out a lot cheaper for us this time, mostly as we were quite picky about the location being quite near my brother’s flat.


FLIGHTS
Finally we seemed to have cracked the flights. Hong Kong to Seoul is a 3.5 hour flight (maybe why it seemed quite so easy after all the long-haul we’ve been doing recently). We chose our flight times very carefully, leaving Hong Kong at 9.30am on the way out, and leaving Seoul at 3.15pm on the way home. We took quite a few small toys with us, as well as stickers, magazines and a couple of books. Getting our 3-year-old to carry these in his new backpack helped a lot! But TV and snacks remain our lifesavers on any flight.


HOTEL

We were travelling with a 3-year-old and a 17-month- old, and it took some time to find a hotel that had one room that big enough for an extra bed and a cot at a reasonable price. Hotels in Seoul don’t guarantee cots for children over 12 months, so we had to bring our own travel cot. We stayed at Hotel Lotte City in Mapo:

http://www.lottecityhotelmapo.com/main/main.asp

It was great for our needs with a pool and a decent breakfast buffet (but no room service), but there are definitely better hotels in terms of location and facilities if you don’t need to be in that part of town.


GETTING AROUND TOWN

We used both the subway (excellent but a LOT of steps, so not good for buggies) and taxis (cheap) to get around. Seoul is pretty easy to navigate as long as you give taxi drivers very precise instructions in Korean. We didn’t find one who spoke English, and had to rely on directions written down from the hotel and my brother’s Korean to help us.


TOP TIPS

We had absolutely perfect weather for our trip in early June. It was warm, sunny and dry and a very welcome escape from hot and humid Hong Kong. The summer in Seoul is very wet and warm, the winter is freezing, so the autumn/spring months are definitely the best choice for a visit.

The main thing we found with this city break is that we really needed to slow down! We headed back to the hotel for downtime in the afternoons, and took a lot of cafe breaks in order to avoid meltdowns, which we managed pretty well.

Flight Review: Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur with Cathay Pacific (3 hours)

We had an early morning flight so we checked in the day before using Hong Kong's In Town check in.  This saved us a lot of hassle on the day of travel. HK Airport was so busy our friend's who were travelling with us weren't able to check their bags all the way through to Langkawi.
I had booked the flight using Cathay Miles a while back and secured the bassinet for my 6 month old baby.
Cathay's regional fleet aren't particularly new but the service is normally good and on time.  I always forget but Cathay give you a pack with some diapers, Mustela nappy cream and nappy bag.  They also gave me 2 jars of baby food and some apple juice (shown in picture above).  Cathay also give the kids a pack with some crayons, stickers etc.
We had video on demand so my toddler sat and watched the Muppets movie.  All in all a pretty good flight.

Flight Review: Cathay HK to Bangkok

We've just come back from a fantastic villa trip with a group of families to Koh Samui.  More on that later as I thoroughly recommend the villa company we used.

Unfortunately as it was Chinese New Year, I couldn't get us on to the direct Bangkok Airways flights so we flew via Bangkok.

As the flight was 9am, we decided to use the In Town check in the day before so that we could leave a little later the next morning.  Thank goodness we did this as a few hours later my other half developed gastro and was pretty much useless for the next 24 hours.

The plane was one of Cathay's ageing 777s so although it was a bit ropey looking, the seats by the bulkhead were generous.  It was also nice to be sat in a 3 by the window.  Even better was the fact that by total coincidence friends of ours with their children were sat directly behind us.

The skycot was pretty big so the baby was happy and Daisy and her friend played happily for 2 hours underneath the skycot.  As always, the Cathay staff were friendly and helpful.  Cathay will always provide a nappy pack including nappy, nappy sack, Mustela cream and a kids pack.  We were able to take the buggy straight to the plane and then it was waiting for us as we got off at Bangkok.