My Thoughts On My Upcoming China Eastern First Class Flight…

Good evening from Bangkok!

I’m currently writing this post in one of the many Thai Airways Royal Silk lounges awaiting my connecting flight into Shanghai. A few weeks ago, I wrote how I had booked China Eastern First Class. At the time I didn’t think about it much and basically brushed it off but the last few days I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

There’s a few things that I’ve been thinking about and a few points that made me go WTF.

This could be my most interesting review yet…

I’ve been extremely lucky to be able to review some incredible onboard products like the Etihad Residence, Japan Airlines First Class, Cathay Pacific First Class etc.

I think that this maybe my most interesting and possibly most read post because I haven’t seen one written review online. I’m excited to see what the product is actually like and if it’s worth trying again (who knows’?)

Hardly anyone Actually purchases or redeems to fly the product…

This was possibly the funniest part of doing the booking. I rang Qantas to book it and one of the phone the agents said this ”In my 10 years of working in the frequent flyer department, I’ve never seen anyone redeem points to fly it”. I guess that gives me an Idea of what it probably is like.

The China Eastern onboard experience is quite interesting from what I’ve seen…

If you’re on social media and follow those passenger shaming pages, you’ll often see stories of very interesting things being done onboard flights. And a lot of the time it tends to be Asian carriers for some reason, not singling any race or carrier (trust me, all airlines have weird stuff happen).

Possibly the most intriguing thing I’ve seen on these carriers are people smoking onboard and it’s often the crew! Ben at One Mile At a Time & Matthew at Live and Lets Fly experienced this first-hand on a flight last year.

The booking and seat selection is a bit of a pain…

This was the most confusing part of the booking. Apparently, on China Eastern, you can’t select your seat online and have to do it over the phone. I tried a few phone numbers but didn’t have much luck. According to Expertflyer, I’m the only one in First and it looks like I’ve been assigned a seat already.

The other thing is verifying the booking. You enter your ticket number and name into the system and it verifies the booking, except it wouldn’t work for me for some reason and kept giving me an error message.

So who’s looking forward to seeing what China Eastern First is like?