Dear Alex,
My wife and I were recently booked on to Cathay Pacific’s flight CX548, departing Hong Kong at 0925 for Tokyo. We had checked in online a couple of days earlier. When we reached the airport we were told the flight [normally rostered for a 251- to 311-seat A330] had been cancelled because only 50 passengers were booked on to it. We were rebooked on to flight CX520, scheduled to leave 70 minutes later at 1035.
What I don’t understand is why Cathay is insensitive to its customers’ time commitments. We took time off from our busy schedule to have a nice break but were delayed because of insufficient passengers on the flight.
Cathay holds our phone numbers and we are both Diamond members [the highest tier in Cathay’s Marco Polo loyalty scheme], so I believe the airline should have contacted us the night before and put us on the earlier rather than the later flight.
We have written to the Marco Polo club many times and were finally offered 7,500 goodwill miles to compensate for the delay. What more can we do?
Billy Liew, Hong Kong
Alex replies:
Cathay Pacific should have been more proactive in this case. You and your wife held Diamond status and had already checked in online. Surely when the airline decided to cancel the flight, a staff member could have made contact and rearranged the booking?
By offering 7,500 miles, Cathay has made amends for a service lapse. But it is not legally obliged to offer anything further. The point here is that travellers flying within Asia don’t have the sort of passenger rights enjoyed by their counterparts travelling in the European Union. It means, to put it bluntly, that Cathay can afford to adopt such a cavalier attitude towards cancellations because it faces no financial penalty.
Had that incident happened at an EU airport, then, based on the delay and flight length (Hong Kong-Tokyo is 2,960km), you and your wife would each have received €200 in compensation. So the threat of a financial penalty prompts EU carriers to provide more notice – usually at least 14 days – before cancelling a flight for commercial reasons.
All carriers are “consolidating” (a polite industry term for cancelling) under-performing flights in these difficult economic times, so schedule changes do happen. If you book online, it’s wise to recheck flight status nearer the time in case the airline or your agent has failed to contact you or its email alert has ended up in the “spam” bin.
You were lucky in that there are several morning flights leaving Hong Kong for Tokyo so your delay was not excessive. Why not alert the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department (visit cad.gov/hk) to your experiences and ask if it might consider introducing some passenger rights?
