T-118: I hear China is nice this time of year..

One of the hardest parts about creating our around the world routing was getting from the West coast of the US to Australia.  Delta only has one flight a day (which is almost never available on our ticket type according to the agents), and the European carriers don't have any routing.  That left our current routing via Hawaii on Alaska & Hawaiian Airlines.  Unfortunately, the routing involved a 20 hour pit stop in Portland and 3 days in Honolulu.  I wasn't too sad about the time in Hawaii, but it was a little frustrating to "lose" 4 days just getting from Lima to Sydney.  When I did the booking the agent reminded me that what we booked was our "worst case scenerio" and that I should call back often to see if a better routing has come available.  So, today I did so and found out that there was an option to go LAX-CAN-SYD that cut out Portland and Hawaii completely.  It would require a 12 hour layover at LAX but would allow us to leave Lima Saturday morning and arrive in Sydney Monday night.  Our existing routing wouldn't get us to Sydney until Thursday morning.

So, the question is.. how do we feel about 14 hours then 10 hours on China Southern airlines?

My initial thoughts about flying that far on a Chinese airline can be summed up in these photos:

Loaded in like sardines

Perhaps not the safest.. (click for the story of this picture)

Yummy Chinese Food!

So I did some research to decide what to do.  I read tons of reviews on SkyTrax, TripAdvisor, Australian Product Review, DestinationTravel, Epinions, and more.  There are so many airline reviews that it kinda starts to hurt after awhile.  Like most reviews, the majority are written by someone with a complaint to air and rarely by someone with nice things to say.

Here's the facts:
 China Southern is the world's sixth largest carrier in terms of passenger numbers and Asia's largest carrier by both fleet size and number of passengers.  They fly to 121 destinations with 421 aircraft.  They were established in 1988 when the Chinese government cut the national airline into three pieces (the other two are China Eastern and Air China.)  They began flying to LAX in 1997 and joined SkyTeam in 2007.  They currently fly CAN-LAX using the same 777-200s that have been in use for a long time but have recently received several new A330-200's that they use on the CAN-SYD route.  Reviews of the 777's are typically bad ('barely survivable' in business class and 'like Chinese prison camp torture' in coach) but the new A330's get pretty good reviews ('not bad for a Chinese carrier','almost as good as a bargain European carrier').  So what if the flight attendants rarely speak English (how often do you talk to them anyway?) or if China has one of the worst air safety histories in the world?

Here's my favorite quote of all: "China Southern's aircraft have been known to ignore directions from airport control towers, pilots have missed flights and therefore been crewed by co-pilots, planes have attempted to land at the wrong airport and pilots often have poor English and misunderstand control tower instructions. China has one of the worst airline safety records in the world and incidents are more likely to be hidden than investigated."

But this is supposed to be an ADVENTURE, right?  In the spirit of trying new things (and gaining an extra three days in Australia) we decided to book it.  And in about 130 days we will add our own reviews to the huge pile currently on the web..

And after all, they do have a 380!
(Although they are still practicing on domestic routes
before the government will let them fly international)

And remember.. "They only want to hep you!  You say you no have boyfriend!  I say long betta.  That ok, no problem, only 3 dolla mo."

and, after all, in a true emergency.. "There will be doors everywhere..."

China, here we come!

4 AUG LAX-CAN CZ 328 @ 11:30PM
6 AUG CAN-SYD CZ 301 @ 8:20 AM