✅
Verified Review | London to Auckland via Guangzhou with China Southern. Overall a nice onboard experience, with friendly and attentive cabin crew. The ticket was good value for money. I would travel on this airline again. I had ordered gluten free meals, and on both legs of the journey, when I got on board, a crew-member came to see me and make sure of my order. The meals prepared in London were good, but the meals prepared in Guangzhou were not up to the same standard. Refreshments were served regularly on both flights. I found the economy seat cushion on the 787 aircraft to be less comfortable than the economy seat of the China Southern 777 that I had previously flown on. Seat 53A is offset from the window, so you have to lean forward to get a view of the ground below, but it means that there is some extra storage space between the seat and the cabin wall. The on-board entertainment had a good range to choose from, but I mostly listened to my own music and read a book. I was disappointed by the ground service in Guangzhou, where I had a 7.5 hour layover, and hoped to be able to leave the terminal on a transit visa and see a little of the city, like the China Southern web site seemed to say that I could. There were several other plane-loads of transit passengers to be processed, and only three desks open. It took well over an hour standing in a queue before I had my onward boarding pass stamped, and then there was no obvious way to leave the airport - no directions or signage, and no information from the staff that processed me. I ended up wandering around the terminal until my next flight. The free WiFi in the airport worked fine (look for the machines that read your passport and issue a password), although it seemed that some web sites were blocked. I was able to use VPN and RDS to get to Facebook. Prior to the trip I had a great deal of difficulty with the English version of the China Southern Airlines web site. Even though I could identify myself by e-ticket and name, it insisted on me entering a verification code sent to me by SMS - but it would only accept mainland China mobile phone numbers! Very, very frustrating! I found that I could do more by putting the Chinese version of the web site through Google Translate, but in the end I had to make my meal and seat reservations by email through their Auckland office. China Southern, if you are reading this review, you must make your English web site much more usable for people who live outside of China!!