China Eastern Makes A B*tch Move!

Back in May, I flew China Eastern from Hong Kong to Kunming to Lijiang roundtrip. While my enjoyment was mostly out of my friends and less on the flight itself, the flight was a pleasant way to get around for a few hours.

China Eastern Boeing 737-700 Economy Class

Following that was a bit of kerfuffle when my teacher had our e-ticket details, yet I wanted to redeem the flight to SkyPass. While I waited for the miles to credit, they never came. SkyPass tried to contact China Eastern, but you know the problems when airlines try to contact each other.

So in early October, I decided to have some fun got a bit fidgety with China Eastern, who didn’t reply on Twitter (reasonably enough, considering how many Great Walls there are in China), so I started directly contacting @ChinaEasternNA to ask. They had me email them their boarding pass, and did nothing after that.

So I decided to ask how their progress was earlier this week.

So I sent the ticket back to them, again, and their response?

Obviously, I wasn’t worried about the miles (50% of mileage from Hong Kong to Lijiang through Kunming won’t really earn you much), and just decided to claim them to test out how China Eastern would handle the mileage (Korean Air automatically connected my reservation to my account, though the agent seems to have changed, who isn’t nearly as nice – damn!) – or I’d be chasing them down the end of the road the whole time. But here was when I had to toughen up because I’d been asking them for quite a long time – I wasn’t gonna accept that answer.

First of all, what did I do wrong?

• I could have started asking earlier so I had six months for drama
• If I really wanted my miles (which I didn’t), I should have chased them down the road before the miles were about to expire
• I was hard on China Eastern – after all, they’re China Eastern

But what could China Eastern have done on their front?

• They could have checked through and actually done something when I asked in October
• They should check their records and realize I’d been asking them to claim my mileage since October before the ticket miles expired (actually, I’d been asking since May, but Korean Air decided I should contact China Eastern in October)
• To say that the passenger could have asked for mileage earlier when the passenger asked before the mileage was expired is rather ridiculous, in my opinion

Actually, the best key in here was Korean Air. The agent managed to get me to contact China Eastern, but only months after I first asked, trying to sort it out for me then telling me when he couldn’t. Thanks, James! 🙂

Bottom Line

While I wasn’t expecting claiming my mileage to be that easy, it’s really ridiculous that China Eastern would omit a passenger’s request then put the reason on the passenger’s shoulders. For that alone, I’d hesitate to take China Eastern from now on, even with their fantastic new products.

All in all I still don’t expect my miles back, but for the fun I’m going to keep pushing.