100,000 people jostle for 4,445 free Cathay Pacific tickets from US, Canada to Hong Kong
- Free airline tickets from United States and Canada to Hong Kong up for grabs among registered Cathay members over 18 years old
- Post reporter told to expect hour-long wait after ranking 11,478th in queue for tickets from Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles to Hong Kong
A Post check found the number of people vying for 2,890 spots on flights from Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles to Hong Kong passed 73,000 by 8.05am, while those bidding for 1,555 tickets from Toronto and Vancouver reached more than 41,000 just after 9am.
A Post reporter at 8am joined the queue for round-trip tickets from the US to Hong Kong, becoming the 11,478th person in line and told to expect a wait of more than one hour.
The tickets are only available on a first-come, first-served basis, with both giveaways ending on May 24.
Participants in the campaign should be at least 18 years old and registered with Cathay Pacific’s website. Each eligible member is limited to one economy-class ticket.
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Those competing for tickets must complete the site’s booking form in 30 minutes or they will time out and need to rejoin the queue.
The city’s Airport Authority bought some 500,000 tickets from airlines in 2020 when the pandemic was causing an unprecedented impact on air traffic, to support the industry and promote recovery.
The two countries featured in Thursday’s giveaways ranked alongside Singapore and the United Kingdom as the most popular destinations covered, with the site previously offering tickets to the city state and Britain at one point recording 80,000 and 70,000 users, respectively.
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Winners received a promotion code after being successfully redirected from the giveaway’s page to the booking platform. The code allows users to purchase a spot on flights available in the next nine months, but they must pay all applicable taxes and surcharges.
Cathay later announced the giveaways for round-trip tickets from US and Canada to Hong Kong had ended at 10.45am and 11.11am, respectively, because of popular demand.
Among those earlier jostling for a US ticket was Annabella Liang, an agricultural technology industry worker in Chicago, who visited the giveaway page half an hour before the competition began and described the website as slow.
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“I didn’t have a good experience using the system. I got more frustrated when I logged in to find over 10,000 people were in front of me, but the system still asked me to wait for more than one hour,” the 35-year-old said.
“That’s a pure waste of time to ask thousands of people to wait for just more than 2,000 tickets.”
Bryan Chan, a businessman in the sports industry based in Vancouver, said he was also left frustrated by the website. He had hoped to snare a ticket to visit his family in Hong Kong but was unable to log into the page.
“Apparently my information was in their system because of a previous account from a long time ago. But when I followed the instructions to retrieve the information, the carrier gave me an error message,” he said.
“I tried contacting customer service on WhatsApp but got no response.”
The 33-year-old said the website had become very slow two hours before the second giveaway started.
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On the social e-commerce app Xiaohongshu, known as China’s answer to Instagram, the Post found more than 20 entries complaining about failing to get a spot in either giveaway’s queues and the competition website’s unreliability.
One user located in Canada said he had failed to get on the page after attempting to use four devices to snag a ticket.
A US-based user said she was “very speechless” after managing to reach the booking page upon being redirected from the campaign site, only for the former to go blank and display a message saying: “the upstream server is timing out.”
A Post check found that the price for a round-trip ticket from New York to Hong Kong on the carrier ranges from HK$36,000 (US$4,596) to over HK$52,000, while the round-trip ticket from Toronto to Hong Kong costs around HK$30,000 to HK$41,000.
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The airline has set a target of 70 per cent of pre-pandemic passenger flight capacity by the end of the year and 100 per cent at the end of 2024.
According to travel agents, airfares have increased by between 15 and 40 per cent compared with pre-pandemic prices.
Another giveaway, which will offer airline tickets between Hong Kong and Australia, will be announced in late May, while details for those covering Japan and Taiwan will be revealed in June and July.
Additional reporting by Laura Westbrook
