Business Travel Notes

Done a few business trips lately. Flown longhaul on BA, AA, Cathay, Sing Air. My brush with greatness was seeing Gordon Ramsay in the AA first class lounge at JFK. I did not bother him, although if I had to say anything I would have mentioned that his Plane Food is one of the saving graces to Heathrow T5 (second best thing behind BA lounges). The AA flight was interesting. I luckily got upgraded to first class. The first class lounge was pleasant, no, not quite as nice as the BA business class lounge at JFK, but no complaints. From what I could tell, the AA business class lounge, like the United one, does the embarrassing thing of issuing travelers a couple of drink coupons and then nickel-and-diming you after that. Cheap. The AA in-flight service was really pleasant. I'd flown AA over the atlantic a few times in the late 90s and the service usually mediocre, so it was a nice surprise to be treated so well and cheerfully. Just one data point, but kudos to AA flight attendants.

BA flights were good as always. Onboard service almost always really nice. And I love the LHR T5 first class lounge. Sadly, looks like I've not quite flown enough this membership year to retain my coveted "gold" status, so no more first class lounge for me. Oh well. In related news, T5 still sucks. Although arriving in T3 was crazy -- that terminal's a bit of a madhouse now. I hear good things about T4 now, but of course it's difficult to get there because the express train doesn't stop. Maybe it's easier to say that LHR is pants.

In Tokyo I used both Narita and Haneda. Haneda is approximately 1700 miles closer to Tokyo than is Narita. Quick little international terminal there, great stuff. Everything about HKG is as good as I remember. I did get to use the Cathay lounge for the first time, which was actually kind of dull. It was smallish, and all table service (or chair services I suppose). I prefer self-serve, but if the waiters want to keep grabbing me glasses of fizzy water, I guess that's fine. I left the lounge early and wandered around the airport a bit. One shop I liked was sponsored by the local trade association and featured solely Hong Kong designers. Lots of phone cases but some interesting other things as well.

Cathay flights were predictably really nice. One feature I loved: an outside camera view (underside of plane, facing forward). Very cool while landing.

Singapore's Changi airport takes the cake. Just fabulous. Bustling and efficient yet somehow calm and quiet. No constant blaring noise that especially fouls US airports. Carpeted walkways, lots of space and air, good shops, good looking choice of restaurants (food standards are high in Singapore by default). Live koi! Free video games. Free internet. Gardens. Free movie viewing. A gym. And a bunch of other stuff I've already forgotten. Damn.

Mumbai airport. Well, not sure I can describe it accurately. Waited on the tarmac a while after parking, after a flight in Sing Air that was of course super nice. Exited onto bus. Immediately (seriously, fewer than 10 meters away) upon going through passport control, had to queue up again to have someone verify that my passport was stamped. Why? Do they not trust the people who just stamped them? That sets the tone. More queues, scans, checks. Leaving was even worse. New form and long queues just for immigration control while leaving. Why? Why do they care who leaves? Then umpteen security checks. Noisy place. At the boarding gate, between queuing up to get on the plane and actually getting on the plane, the security tag on my carryon and my boarding pass were checked no fewer than 5 times (5, *after* arriving at the gate), including a rescan and search. In one of the earlier security lines, I did accidentally bodycheck a soldier with an interesting-looking automatic weapon. He was very polite and apologetic, even. I shudder to think what would have happened I'd done the same in a US airport. So in general, despite a very, very short time, there, the thing I noticed about anything, such as the airport, less than pleasant about Mumbai: it would be a thousand times worse except most everyone is so darned good natured. So mostly it's just fine and I end up chastising myself not to be an asshole.

Food on the trip to Asia was excellent all around. Great food in Tokyo. The bar is high. Expensive but baseline quality even at average place is extremely high. Fantastic stuff. Hong Kong I love kind of all around. Food there can be excellent, or can be a bit dodgy, but I enjoyed plenty of the good stuff, including an epic dim sum lunch that had about 5 more courses of food than I was expecting. Singapore very nice, although the whole city is a bit like a grown-up warm-weather canary wharf. That much nicer but so overly controlled and curated it doesn't have the pizazz and buzz of, say, Hong Kong. But stunning at night. In Mumbai I had a couple great meals. One more local, lots of vegetarian dishes that were quite tasty along with a minority of meatier fare. The second was meat-heavy northern cuisine. I ate about 5 pounds of perfectly cooked and beautifully spiced lamb shank. Yum.

Hotels? Stereotypically, the standard of service at hotels in each leg of my Asia trip was just fantastic. As with airports, really puts western experience to shame. Mumbai hotels take security very seriously, as you might guess. (Is there some rule about having a really impressive-looking Sikh manning the final security check at the front door of every hotel there? Seriously, each hotel I went to had a large, super-relaxed-and-friendly-because-he's-probably-a-stupendous-badass smiling arrivals into the metal detector.) In any case, every hotel on my trip seemed to take service very seriously. Although the Tokyo Hotel could have done with less bowing, more wifi. And let's just say the Hong Kong Mandarin Oriental won the overall prize for awesomeness.