China Eastern Airlines

✅ Trip Verified | Shanghai to Melbourne. Last minute trip booked for a family of 4 (2 adults, 2 children, 6 yrs and 2 yrs). Was originally scheduled to fly back to MEL from HK but had to double back to Shanghai and Cathay did not have any available flights to MEL til 12/1/19. Had to settle with China Eastern Airlines as they flew direct to MEL. MU739 was due to depart SH at 12:20am on 5th Jan. By the time we reached the gate, we had already been awake for 22 hours (funeral was on the morning of 4th Jan). Was advised by ground staff at gate to bring stroller onto bus and give to ground staff on tarmac to ensure it is taken on board. There was no airline employee on tarmac when the bus arrived next to the plane, either to control foot traffic or to receive my stroller. Most passengers crowded onto the staircase leading to the entrance of the plane, the bitter cold and wet weather did not help matters. China Eastern Airlines has a policy of re-scanning boarding passes right before boarding the plane (to avoid abscondees?) which they decided to carry out half way up the covered staircase, in turn creating a bottleneck situation with more than half of the bus passengers left on the tarmac exposed to the cold and rain. I had no choice but to carry the folded stroller, along with carry-on luggage and trying to hold on to my 6 yr old daughter, up the slippery and over-crowded staircase. She slipped and fell 3 times along the way. While I was complaining to a flight attendant, the Cabin Manager intervened and accused me of being disrespectful and threatened to throw me off the flight. The cabin manager took all of my criticisms of the airline's practices as personal attack and insisted that I was insulting him. I attempted to de-escalate the situation by going to my seat but he blocked the passage way and shoved me when I tried to go past him. I did not make any further contact with him after I found my seats. 15 minutes later, ground security approached me, to ask me to leave the flight. I tried to appeal to the Captain of the plane but was told that my emotional state posed a safety concern for the rest of the passengers and that an apology to the cabin manager could have rectified the situation but it was too late. My request for an interpreter was denied; we were given 1 minute to decide whether I leave on my own or together as a family; airline staff promised there would be assistance available back at the departure gate. However, we discovered there was no one to assist us, apart from two lowly ranked employees who brought our checked-in luggage. We ended up being stranded at Shanghai airport for 20 hours until the next available CE flight as the airline refused to refund me the airfare or transfer us to a different airline. I spoke to no fewer than a dozen CE staff at the airport and on the customer service helpline, no one acknowledged the desperate situation we were in. As this was a last minute trip to attend a funeral service, we did not carry much Chinese currency on us (Currency exchange was also closed), local sim card to make phone calls for external assistance. Since this incident, I have followed up on average twice a day with CE. To date, all I have received are broken promises (to call within x hours) and hand-balling of my complaint.

✅ Trip Verified | Sydney to Los Angeles via Shanghai. My mother in law. was booked for special services as she had limited mobility and she couldn’t communicate in English. I was advised that she would be helped on Shanghai but she received no help at all. She was walking around airport anxious and scared showing the letter I wrote pledging for help just in case. Luckily I wrote the letter to help her and one kind women helped her after hour of walking around. She medically have knee problems. It is extremely traumatic incident for her and family. I am very annoyed with the service and would recommend no one to use the service.

✅ Trip Verified | Melbourne to London via Shanghai. Customer service Both customer service office in Melbourne and Sydney office were very helpful. Please note that the Melbourne office is only contactable by email (never answers the phone) If you want to speak to someone call the Sydney office. Crew Very professional in all flights. Thank you to them for making our flight an enjoyable experience. Time Keeping: all four were flights arrived on time, very unusual in my experience. PVG Terminal 1 Departures/Transit Depending on your ticket class, the airline offers a dining voucher (selected places) when having a long stop over in PVG, 80RMBpp. This is enough to get you a decent bowl of noodles each at Hope Star Coffee & Cafe. The info is on their website but difficult to find. See below for more transiting info. Check In - PVG Many check-in desks open, very quick and painless. CONS Food Poor, even coming out of Shanghai. Turbulence: At the first sign of turbulence the seat belt sign lights up and then stays on for the entire flight. This happened on all four flights. Everyone ends up ignoring it as a result. Website Hard to navigate and makes many errors Online Check In Pointless both in London and Shanghai, no bag drop for online check in (Only MEL). Check In - LHR Very few check in desks open, 1 hour to check-in. Boarding Passes When checking in online it asks you to print your boarding passes (no point as they print it for you at the airport). Our computer could not find the font to print the boarding passes. Another occasion, the website did not recognise our check-in. PVG Terminal 1 Arrivals: cash machine did not work on our arrival. If this is the case you need to walk to terminal 2 to withdraw cash. PVG Terminal 1 Departures/Transit Shops are generally quite poor and expensive and so to are the nearly all the restaurants. One cafe that stands out is Hope Star Coffee & Cafe, serves decent food nicely presented, by far the best place to eat in Terminal 1. There is also two Starbucks, one at each end of the terminal, one has seats inside the other just takeaway. Depending on your ticket class or your time of stopover you could instead choose a maglev pass or a hotel room for a number of hours over the dining voucher. But the airline said we could not leave the airport with a 7hr stopover. When waiting to go through immigration and number of people we told they could not enter on their transit and we directed through to the transit area. If you’re looking to stopover for a couple of days you can get a 144hr visa on arrival at no charge. This also allows you to visit selected provinces. The Bullet train makes it possible to do this. We visited friends in Nanjing, on our return leg to Shanghai the train took 1hr 11mins to travel 290km, costing around $35AUD one way.

✅ Trip Verified | Colombo to Toronto via Beijing. I was more than happy with the level of service, quality of flight and meals etc. Boarding was done efficiently, For a full flight I think it was done in record time. The B777 J class has full lie-flat seats with ample space and amenities. The PVG-CMB leg was on an A330 with pod-type seats in J class which were not lie-flat and I had the constant feeling that I was going to slide off the front of the seat. The IFE and software is a little stunted for someone with no knowledge of Chinese. There are some issues with dual language. Naturally the base language is Chinese but the software has not been translated fully into English and is a little difficult to navigate. There is also an online food ordering system which was not in service at the time. There was no problem with the meals - I chose the Chinese cuisine. The timings of the meal service was unusual though - I thought it was later than most carriers would do it. I thought the cabin crew worked well and communicated fine despite the language barrier. I would have liked to see another couple of rounds of beverage offered. One complaint which others have mentioned before. On the outbound YYZ-PVG leg, there were five occasions where the smell of cigarette smoke wafted around the cabin during the flight. I would fly China Eastern again.

✅ Trip Verified | My 83 year old father was traveling Kunming to Kolkata in July 2018. Before boarding on his flight, the airport agent told him he could not use the current ticket because his middle name was spelled wrong by one letter. He explained that he just flew on two previous airlines and no one gave any trouble. They made him buy a new ticket and had him pay $1,100 US dollars. They said he could not use a credit card. I wrote to China Eastern after returning from my trip to complain. They replied by saying they would look into the matter ASAP. Three months later, I am still waiting for their reply.

Not Verified | Booked a flight from Vancouver, Canada to Melbourne, Australia via Shanghai Pudong with a 7-hour layover. Due to work demands, I needed to stay in Shanghai for a few more days. At the check-in counter, I asked for my checked baggage to be taken out at Shanghai, instead of being shipped straight to Melbourne, with the intention of rebooking once I landed in Pudong. This is where the nightmare began. The check-in personnel told me that they could only ship my baggage to Melbourne. Quoting verbatim: “You have two choices, either rebooking your flight this instant or shipping your baggage directly to Melbourne.” On top of all this, I was not able to rebook my flight with the China Eastern customer service, so I was forced to wait over the phone to rebook my flight while the minutes ticked by. When the flight was rescheduled, I was informed that it was too late for me to board the Vancouver to Shanghai flight. At this moment, I was informed that as a last resort, I could have signed a waiver to take out my baggage in Shanghai. Why couldn’t China Eastern have told me this before the check-in counters closed?! Due to the utter ineptitude of the customer service personnel over a minor matter, I missed my initial flight, was made to forfeit my entire round-trip itinerary, and on top of all this, my work obligations were forcibly delayed. No apologies and/or compensation were offered, but there were plenty of finger-pointing and shrugging off responsibility. I would not recommend this airline under any circumstances. Please save your time, money, and sanity and choose a better alternative.

✅ Trip Verified | Beijing to Qingdao. I focus on the lack or urgency of email request. I requested on 8 Nov by email for an aisle seat for flight of 13 November 2018. I was unable to find other contact email address in the official website. First contact was then impossible. There was no reply until 19 November. The reply requested me instead to contact customer service email. Looks like a standard reply with no human touch to it. So I wrote to customer service with no reply up till today 28 November 2018. On the day of check in I asked for aisle seat again. The counter at Beijing airport told me it is impossible although I am a Delta member. I do not expect much. Seriously the official website of China Eastern Airline should have a email contact address for passenger contact. Fair enough if a 3 working day lapse for reply is done. However, for my case there was no urgency to reply to me. I rate the service 2/10 and will avoid flying China Eastern since the service is so bad.

✅ Trip Verified | Flew business class between Kunming and Shangri-La. Excellent 55 minute flight. I had lounge access in KMG and was the sole passenger on the KMG-DIG flight. Coffee (Nescafe gold?) was quite good for inflight coffee. The flight attendant kept me up to date with arrival times and pointing out interesting scenery along the way. The plane itself was a brand-new B737 with all of the bells and whistles. I was surprised to find it on an intra-provincial leisure route. J seating is generous 2-2.

✅ Trip Verified | I couldn't pass up a business class fare for the same price as Thai Economy on this route. The experience was a pleasant surprise from start to finish. Check-in was efficient at the dedicated business counter. To my delight, China Eastern uses the Thai Airways business lounge, which is superior to the 3rd-party contract options at BKK. I got to enjoy a Thai curry and Singha before my flight, well done. On board, the business cabin crew were polite, efficient, and had sufficient English to assist non-Chinese pax. A variety of adequate but not memorable meal options were available. I had a Chinese chicken dish over rice with a glass of Tsingtao beer. The aircraft was neither brand new nor very old, but it was clean and in suitable condition. The 2-2 seats were fine for the 2.5 hour regional journey. On arrival (if you don't end up at a jetbridge at the airport), Business pax get a special van to the terminal, as opposed to a packed-to-bursting bus. This benefit is very welcome after a day of travelling. It's not SQ, but they're not charging SQ prices.

✅ Trip Verified | Chicago to Manila via Shanghai. It exceeded what I thought our experience would be. I have also set my expectation low so I wouldn't have regrets. We flew from Chicago O'hare check in line was long but it was moving fast. China Eastern airport crew was nice. Got in the gate we didn't need to wait in line since I have 2 kids with me so we were the first ones in the plane. We didn't had the seat number I saved through Cheapoair (don't know who changed it) so instead of window aisle we are in the middle aisle which isn't too bad since there's not much to see outside the window. I am only 5 ft tall so leg room was enough. Individual entertainment available. We're vegetarian so I requested for it since the day I purchased our tickets but for whatever reason the first meal they said we are not on the list of special request. We waited and later they came with a vegetarian meal. I am not very picky with food I tend to enjoy it even in the simplest way. Crew are nice too. The airline changed our itinerary from few hours to overnight at Shanghai before we head to Manila. It took one day off our vacation but it was good too because we get to see Shanghai. Both flights (to MNL & back to USA) are the same, overnight at Shanghai. Flight to MNL was good too, full meal on our 4hrs flight. So we had a good flight experience with China Eastern.