Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium: Hey, This Is Polished

Today I flew Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium class on the 4h 10m flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo Narita. Greater Bay Airlines pioneered their Premium product about three weeks ago, when their first 737 MAX 9 entered service. I had a flight booked on a 737 MAX 9, and while the introductory prices were far too expensive to justify, the airline is running extremely attractive promotions to buy up at the airport counter on the day of your flight.

Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium class is much like a low-cost airline premium product – Scoot, Batik Air Malaysia, and Norse Atlantic come to mind. However, I was surprised by the service style on the flight, which clearly showed thoughtfulness – more so than I was expecting.

I’m fresh off the flight, so thought I’d share my first impressions (including my experience buying up to Premium at the airport), and I’ll review the flight in full when I get to this trip report.

How I purchased an upgrade to Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium Class

When Greater Bay Airlines first introduced their Premium cabin, they weren’t doing one-way fares anywhere below HK$7,000 (£663). As much as I’m invested in giving you guys the best possible overview of the aviation scene throughout Europe and Asia, and as much as I’d like to properly review all of the premium products flying out of my “home home” airport, I’m not paying £663 for a one-way flight that lasts under four hours. I now see much lower fares (around HK$3,900/£370 one-way for Hong Kong to Tokyo, for example) during the low season, though that wasn’t available when I was finalising my plans.

However, a week or so ago on Instagram, I noticed that the airline was selling buy-ups at the airport counter on their Bangkok route for as little as HK$500 (£47). Since I’m trying Japan Airlines’ new premium economy class shortly, I had a flight to Tokyo booked, which was somewhat coincidentally on a Boeing 737 MAX featuring the new Premium cabin. I figured that if upgrades were going, they couldn’t be going for that much more than HK$500, so I started monitoring how many Premium seats were left on the flight I was taking.

There actually weren’t any Premium seats left for sale when I checked this morning – inventory was zeroed out. However, since I was planning on heading to the airport early at that point anyway, I figured you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and there was no harm in asking.

There was indeed no harm in asking – the counter agent called over a supervisor, and the supervisor processed my upgrade within seconds. The upgrade rate was HK$900 (£85), and this was charged to my credit card. When I asked how many seats were available, he said “nobody else is booked on yet, though we do promotional rates on the day of departure, so I can’t say how full the cabin will be”. I was asked whether I had a window or aisle seat preference, and was even assigned my favourite window seat at the back of the cabin.

Score!

I still don’t know why they weren’t selling any seats online when I checked earlier this morning – they didn’t really give me an answer when I asked. Funnily enough, the cabin ended up going out full, meaning that everybody else also upgraded.

For the record, this must be the biggest discrepancy between a list price and a at-the-airport-counter upgrade rate I’ve ever seen. The upgrade rates are fixed by flight distance, and they’re even running promotional rates at the moment until January 31st:

• An upgrade on a flight to Taipei, Manila, Bangkok or anywhere in China costs HK$500/£47
• An upgrade on a flight to Phu Quoc, Kuala Lumpur, or anywhere in Japan (except Sapporo) costs HK$900/£85
• An upgrade on a flight to Sapporo or Jakarta costs HK$1,400/£133
• If you’re upgrading two or more people, you get a HK$100/£9 discount per person

Of course, your flight needs to be operated by a 737 MAX in order to upgrade. Unless you’re on a fully flexible ticket, you also can’t change your flight to another one that goes to the same destination.

Greater Bay Airlines Premium Upgrade Fares

These upgrades have to be done same-day – I was at the airport earlier this week coming off the back of a family trip (to Danang on Hong Kong Airlines), and tried to drop by the Greater Bay Airlines counter. I was told that the promotional buy-up rates only applied on the day of departure, which is very fair.

I’m not saying that these rates are a steal – you get a marginally better experience, and some may be okay without splurging the extra cash from economy (it’s not like you get a lie flat bed or an enclosed suite with caviar, for example). I’m just noting that the upgrade rates tend to low far below list price, especially if you’re travelling over peak season, or booking last-minute.

In my case I’d paid a HK$1,900 (£180) one-way fare for a peak season ticket, and an extra HK$500 (£47) fee since I had a change of plans, so my ticket total with the upgrade came to HK$3,300 (£312). That’s still way below list price, though not the best deal for a four-hour flight I’ve ever seen. However, if you come in with a low-season ticket and upgrade at the counter, you might get a much better deal than I did.

Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium Class Seat: Nice, Reasonably Well-Designed

Greater Bay Airlines picked an off-the-shelf seat for their 737 MAX Premium product – it’s the Safran Z600 product, which you’ll find on United, Breeze Airways, and more. As you’d expect, there are two rows of seats in a 2-2 configuration.

Greater Bay Airlines 737 MAX Premium Class Cabin

I appreciated the seat’s recline function – it had a huge cradling effect, so the seat pan moved forward when you reclined. This meant that when the person in front of you reclined, it didn’t encroach much into “your” space. I also found the legrest to be sturdy, and the footrest to be extremely substantial.

Greater Bay Airlines 737 MAX Premium Class Recline

Along with a sturdy tray table and tablet holders, there was also USB-A and USB-C charging, as well as a 110V power port.

Greater Bay Airlines 737 MAX Premium Class Power Ports

Since I was one of the first onboard, I had a sneak peek at economy. It also looked quite nice, with USB-A and USB-C charging ports, and the first five “preferred” rows even had adjustable headrests (the rest don’t).

Greater Bay Airlines 737 MAX Economy Class

For the record, these planes don’t have WiFi yet (nor was there ever a mention of WiFi during the flight), despite the fact that the airline has been advertising them on the 737 MAXs. To be fair, the airline did say that WiFi was subject to regulatory approval, and would gradually be rolled out.

Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium Class Catering: Same As Economy, But Complimentary

The only advertised soft product upgrade on Greater Bay Airlines is the fact that there’s free catering, and beverages are unlimited. Not the entire food menu is complimentary – four of the options are chosen as dining options for Premium passengers, and the rest are chargeable. On this flight, there was a baked pork chop, lasagna, chicken and sausage pasta, and a vegetarian rice. These are served the same way as you’d get if you bought a meal in economy (no china casserole dishes or metal cutlery here) – you also don’t get a menu card or anything, so the flight attendant had to repeat this multiple times to each passenger.

My pork chop rice was served with some cutlery, palmier cookies, and I was also asked what I wanted to drink (I was sleepy, so I declined). Traditional pork chop rice is not known for its presentation, and that definitely wasn’t an exception here – though it was every bit as delicious as you’d expect from a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong. My experiences with catering onboard Greater Bay Airlines have consistently been great.

Greater Bay Airlines 737 MAX Premium Class Meal

Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium Cabin Service: Woah, I Didn’t Expect This

On my flight, the crew were friendly, though I wouldn’t necessarily say that they were the most energised or excited to serve passengers. What impressed me more was the level of detail that had clearly been incorporated into the training.

On the ground you don’t get lounge access or anything, though priority boarding was clearly honoured (there was a dedicated lane that was first to board), and you get priority baggage as well – this is probably more to Tokyo Narita’s credit than Greater Bay Airlines, but my bag was the first to exit the carousel.

Once boarding was complete, the cabin crew came around to greet everyone by name, hand them the below keychain and a bottle of water, and take their meal order. We were even asked when we’d like our meal to be served during the flight (I guess it’s not quite the same as dine-on-demand, since you can only order one item).

Greater Bay Airlines 737 MAX Premium Class Keychain

I fell asleep between takeoff and the meal service, and was addressed by name when the cabin crew woke me up with my meal (very not something I’m used to, especially as a young professional in the UK).

The experience also felt quite full-service – for example, when deplaning, the cabin crew pulled the curtain shut between Premium and economy, so we could deplane first. The only exception was that everyone was able to use the forward bathroom – this actually created a bathroom queue that was very hard to manage before landing, which I’ll detail in a separate post.

Greater Bay Airlines’ Website: Still Sucks

For how smooth my day was, and how polished the airline appears to be, I still can’t believe how much Greater Bay Airlines’ website lags behind the actual on-the-day experience:

• Booking the flight was fine, but you can’t change your flight online without contacting them on WhatsApp: I actually managed to do this fine a few months back, though when reaching out to them regarding a potential upgrade, I never got a response (I’m still “in the queue”, around 10 days later)
• While not a big deal, I don’t like that you need the full order number or ticket number to even pull up the reservation, as opposed to a 6-digit PNR as with most other airlines
  • The original check-in interface would ask for either the order number or the ticket number, but would then redirect you to an autofilled form that would only take the ticket number (so if you used the order number, it’d generate an error – after a CAPTCHA)
• I checked in online on the website, which generated a boarding pass, though I couldn’t send this to my phone: when I tried to pull up online check-in on my phone, it said “online check-in closed”, and couldn’t find my booking anymore
• Perhaps this is because I had a flight change, though I originally paid a (very small) fee for seat selection. This seat showed as retained in the “Manage Your Booking” interface post-change, though wasn’t retained during online check-in – the seat wasn’t even available, and I had to select another seat (obviously this ended up being a moot point)
• My upgrade wasn’t reflected on the “Manage Your Booking” interface at any point

Perhaps this is why I’m so surprised by how put together my flight felt – Greater Bay Airlines really needs to up its tech game, considering how competitive tech is with their biggest competitor HK Express (as well as Cathay Pacific).

Conclusion: Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium Class

I flew Greater Bay Airlines from Hong Kong to Tokyo today, and had a much more polished and put-together experience than I was expecting. The seat and food were pretty much exactly as I expected, though I was surprised by the polished service.

I think that the at-the-counter upgrade rates are very attractive, and if you’ve not flown the cabin before and generally like trying new airlines in premium cabins, I’d certainly give this one a shot. (The off-peak rates for this product are also much more reasonable than they were in the past.)

Have you flown Greater Bay Airlines’ Premium class before? How was your experience?