Slow day skimming through 优酷, Jeremy?

Ha! I was also in Hangzhou and trying to fly to Beijing on Wednesday evening. It was chaotic with many flights delayed & cancelled but at least other airlines had the decency to formally cancel their flights at a reasonable hour. My Air China flight was meant to leave at 9PM but no announcements were made, it was almost 1AM before they formally told us the flight had been cancelled and that we could go to a hotel. It was 3:30AM before I got to bed although, to their credit, it was a nice Chinese 5-star hotel.

I also took some video of the Chinese passengers yelling at the ground staff while the foreigners stood around looking slightly bemused by the situation.

What was annoying was i) not been told what was going on, and ii) later, when someone did mention a reason for the delays it was different each time. First of all we heard that it was bad weather over Shandong ("So then why can't you fly around the bad weather" "No, that wouldn't be possible"), and then the story was a thunderstorm in Beijing had closed the airport but my wife was in Beijing and said it hadn't rained at all.

Finally someone uploaded about Air China flights, I just want to understand when Airlines will know time is important for passenger some might have important business meeting, some might have personal reason.
Flight delays impact individual as well as business, but given the attitude WHO CARES, well try to think about compensating, having Service Level Agreements on flights make people happy to go for an particular Air Line company service.

Hope this helps

this kind of shit happens everywhere in the world. why is it a sign for china being incapable of holding Olympic? i had way worse experiences in the states. there were no hotel rooms for canceled flights and no staff working at the airport to solve passengers' confusion. i prefer chinese airports' customer service.

If my understanding is not wrong then it has nothing to do with China been capable for hosting Olympics, it was more for Air China been sponser of Oympics.

Yes this happens everywhere & the Airline companies should care more about the passenger by compensating or having service level agreement to delight end user or why a person pays instead of using railways or other means? Just imagine a person getting delayed to reach the destination for 5/6 hrs : (1) For business person time is important to make the deal which goes really bad (2)For elder citizens how inconvinent it can be to wait in airport then after reaching destination wait in taxi or bus line for hrs?

Asian culture is polite & caring coz im asian too, so why not service industries bring it into their customer services & set example in the world?

Im Chinese is so right! Anyone remember a few years ago in the USA, when it was accepted "knowledge" that a slowdown was being effected by disgruntled airport/airline workers, and it was common fact that one had to add 1-2 hours to each trip? Anyone remember how many many flights sat on the ground, with pax strapped into overheated, underventilated planes, for an hour, while who knows when the plane would take off? And how about the wonderful attitudes of airline gate attendants? Great remorse and personal outpourings of sympathy? Yeah, right. Well, at least they are trained to say "sorry." Small consolation. Yet who carries on about USA being unfit to host Olympics? Give it a break. Sit down and read a book or listen to the IPod, or chat with your girlfriend. Have a(nother) beer. Stress is a killer, and it won't get the planes off the ground any faster.

As usual, there's right and wrong on both "sides" of this.

Catching an international Air China flight a few weeks ago, and the contrast at Beijing Capital was stark. NOT ONE other airline was employing the horrible, outdated, "phalanx" queue system. NOT ONE other airline had shouting chaos at the counters. NOT ONE other airline had unclear signs. NOT ONE other airline refused to call economy passengers forward when there was no-one waiting for the biz-class and 1st-class counters (and, to be fair, they couldn't, because of the previously mentioned bad queue system). And that's at the same airport on the same day!

Chinese companies do many things well, but crowd control is generally not one of them. This problem seems to be mainland only, though, as checking in for Dragon Air, or Cathay, is hassle-free.

In 17 years of business flying, I have seen every kind of airport/airline screw-up happen in over 30 countries.

That said, in my experience no-one is worse than Air China in priming the system for frequent failure by refusing to implement even the most basic modern crowd control techniques.

The comments had nothing to do with China being able or unable to host the Olympics, but that Air China is not the best brand to be made the Olympic sponsor due to their bad service. (At least China Eastern wasn't chosen.)

Personally, I find Shanghai Airlines and Shenzhen Airlines to both have the best service in all of China (aside from Dragon Air or Cathay Air). Too bad that neither could ever be considered Olympic model worthy.

I was going to agree with Te. I flew on China Eastern and every flight I used was delayed over an hour and passengers on each of those flights started screaming at ground staff and the flight attendants.

i think it's pretty clear that air services in China are not very good. I mean, they work, but not as well as they should if you're going to be an international air hub.

I'm glad someone finally brought this up. As I've personally flown (domestically) Air China on many occasions, I've been appalled by the customer services attitude of their employees, especially at the Beijing airport. On my first trip coming back to Dalian via Beijing, the announcers made, get this, NINE gate changes within 30 minutes before take off. The last gate change announcement was made 5 minutes before take off and the passengers had to travel from one wing to the other. Come on, this is ridiculous.

My second trip back via Beijing was even worse. It's very similar to the Hangzhou incident mentioned above. Managers kept on telling us about phantom "weather issues" when clearly there were none back at home. After putting us in a 5-star hotel, they woke us up at 5:30AM just to try to ship us out on the first flight of the day. But later we found out there were even more delays. Basically, passengers were stranded in Beijing for over 20 hours. We had a riot and blocked another flight from being boarded before they finally found a flight for us in the end.

We weren't mad at the bad attitude of their workers. You see stuff like this everywhere. Disgruntled workers are expected. What pissed me off was the lack of responsibility by a major airline company that calls itself a "sponsor of the Olympic games." People spend thousands on an airplane ticket because they want to promptly go from one location to another. If you can't do that due to various unforseen reasons then try your best to accomodate to the passengers and find other ways. If still that can't be accomplished, then compensation through refunds or vounchers.

On that incident, Air China repeatedly lied to us. They kept telling us we would be able to leave Beijing when they knew we had to spend a night. They told us about weather problems when there weren't any. When we were delayed beyond 20 hours, they offered no apologies, no refunds, no vouchers of any kind. They simply stated technical difficulties and weather delays. However, when the passengers finally resorted to using force did they "conveniently" come up with an airplane to take us back home.

Yeah man, forget Beijing airport punks. Shang Hai airport workers are wayyyyyy nicer.

China Air Force owns the air space in China.
If the air force decide to do some military practice, the civilian flights are screwed.

There is a huge difference between service in China and service in the United States where response to an unfortunate situation occurs.

In the US, there is some sense of equality--simply because you are a business person or a politician does not mean you will be able to get satisfaction any easier than a fellow passenger. This is known by all, and so outbreaks of anger are rare.

In China, people think all the time about class and quality and assume that they are more important than the next person and are therefore entitled to better treatment than the person next to them. When this is not forthcoming, disputes break out. "Little emperors" who have always gotten their way are bewildered why they are not served or treated uniquely or with preference. They plead their particular case, but never that of the passengers as a whole. Worse, staff are treated as the migrant workers some of them are and yelled at, and condemned.

Add to this situation that no one believes what they are told by any authority or official and one gets scenes like this at every airport every day.

This case has less to do with the Olympics--which promises to be a disaster--and more to do with a society in which officials praise the Chinese educational system while sending their children overseas; where businessmen transfer as many assets as they can abroad; and in which class and disregard for one's fellows dominate a purportedly classless and civilized society.

No other country or culture engages in such self-praise and behaves so badly, or aims so high and stoops so low.

SinaSource's comment reminds me of the attitude of a Chinese lady client a few years ago, who had attained her remarkable wealth (from my humble point of view)in unsavory ways in China. She often told me, "I am not an ordinary Chinese." She was surprised when the U.S. District Judge failed to note her superiority to anyone, and further failed to decide, contra to law (and my advice), in her favor.