I looked at Cathay Pacific's website again

To apply the business visa of Thailand, I booked a flight ticket with Cathay Pacific today. This has brought me very mixed feelings.

I used to be a loyal member of Cathay Pacific. It’s really hard not to believe the Skytrax rating as an aviation fan. Winning the Skytrax 5-star airline definitely put more halos on Cathay Pacific for me. I still remember the surprise Cathay Pacific has brought me from the online experience to the entertainment equipments on the plane. Despite all my aversions to them now, I still have to admit that Cathay Pacific is still leading the digital experience in the whole China area.

If you are not familiar with Cathay Pacific, you would probably wonder what’s so special. Here is my user journeys today on Ctrip (a Chinese travel agency giant) and Cathay Pacific’s official website.

I need to book a ticket with the minimal fee to change the date and cancel. The travel agency my company has appointed is Ctrip. Booking tickets on Ctrip simplifies our reimbursement procedure and financial complications of possible surcharges for flight changes. Booking with Ctrip whenever is hence our policy.

I have started checking flight tickets on Ctrip from last week, but the user interface is so devastatingly confusing that even our mobility team has to involve a specialist from Ctrip to help us find the flight for our requirement. Due to my obligation not to expose our internal information (our Ctrip is an internal business version), I will not present a screenshot here. As far as I can describe it, you can see a policy stating the ticket can be changed for free if the change action meets some complicated criteria, and there is another specific change policy form simply stating all changes prior to the departure are free. It seems some field on Ctrip is more overarching than the other, but that’s only the knowledge to their own Ctrip experts. Not to mention how many texts there are on the screen and how many even more texts can be expanded from show-more arrow.

Eventually, with tremendous efforts being devoted, it seems there finally is a flight from Cathay Pacific which seems to meet our simple requirement - can accept a bit more expensive fare, but we want more flexibility to change with no additional fee and cancel at minimal cost. While double-checking with the Ctrip staff, I opened the official website of Cathay Pacific after three years since I decided to give them up.

It was still a breathtaking experience. As an IT consultant, now I can tell it is Grid Design. The font weight and colour just match so perfectly. The animation and shadow aren’t exaggerating at all. Moreover, the visual identity of Cathay Pacific has been pleasing by itself too. Now as I am writing this, I even tested their accessibility. It works!

More than the first impression of the professional and aesthetic user interface design, it’s also a great pleasure to actually use the website. Remembering how painful it is on Ctrip to check how flexible the flight is? This is how Cathay Pacific handles this:

I was really about to cry when I saw this page. Why was it made so hard to check the flexibility of a flight? Is it really that a hard thing? I booked this flight on Ctrip later. As ordered by the Thai embassy, I will have to present the itinerary confirmation produced by the airline company. I went to Cathay Pacific website again and easily retrieved it using my name and the booking number. They provided various ways to check the booking from being a guest to logging in with multiple methods. Even I checked as a guest, it still works perfectly.

I am quite familiar with most major Chinese airlines and their digital services. I don’t recall any airlines have such high standard self-serviced digital experience. Especially when it comes retrieving PII after the happy path, it’s usually only via customer support, which is not really that a bad thing because it’s secure, but having the capability to do it this way demonstrates a stronger governance ability, and it indeed eased my life just today!

I became a bit sentimental today after work. I thought I would never fly with Cathay Pacific again because the heartbreaking feeling that I realized my beloved Cathay Pacific Airways discriminates Chinese Mainlanders (that includes me) has still not faded away. I found the response from Cathay Pacific in 2019 when I requested to have all my personal information deleted from their system, and I thought I am a bit silly. I don’t understand why I found and read this.

I had a lot of memories with Cathay Pacific. It is on a Cathay Pacific airplane that I spoke Cantonese Thank You to other people for the first time. It is Cathay Pacific that brought me to Australia for my working holiday. It is also an airline that I was once proud of as a Chinese aviation fan. It’s really hard to describe my feeling that I found out Cathay Pacific became my only choice on Ctrip which allows free change.

I am sure Cathay Pacific shouldn’t be the only airlines which are providing such options, but with Ctrip it is narrowed down to this particular flight of Cathay Pacific for some reason. As I have a lot of complaints to our own systems, I am still generally glad we at least dealt with the hardest problem, which is concurrency, for such a big population. Nonetheless, thanks to the digitisation regardless of the experience, our lives have still advanced.

I have also seen some platforms in China which are delivering great digital experience. These platforms are all quite new and usually work as WeChat Mini Programs. They really meet the customers' need and look generally quite nice. According to my observation, these platforms, unsurprisingly, cluster in the retailing industry. I don’t know what the cost would be to really transform the traditional industry like airlines, but I really look forward to seeing our evolution in the digital experience. Hopefully this is going to happen in the next one or two decades. As an IT worker, I hope I will do my bit for it.