Most reviewers were unhappy with their experience overall. Customers frequently complained about unexpected flight cancellations, unhelpful customer service representatives, and extremely long waiting times when trying to resolve urgent travel issues. Travelers additionally mentioned major difficulties with the online booking process, severe baggage handling problems, and consistently poor communication from the airline staff members.
Some people were satisfied with the attentive cabin crew, comfortable seats featuring extra legroom, and overall smooth on-time flights. A few other people also felt that the high quality of the food and the warm overall hospitality fully met their expectations during the journey.
Booked LHR to Auckland. Booking, checking-inand anything conducted online was a nightmare. The English website and App are useless. Constantly falling over. I could not manage any aspects of my booking (seats, meals etc) online. No facility to check in online. Calling their help line is impossible. Just sit and hear repeated music loop for long enough to make you upset, but no reply. At the check-in desk they still use a pen and paper to document passengers. Not possible to check baggage on to Auckland from LHR even though I only have 3hr transit in Hainan. It's all looking very bleak. Currently sitting in a BA lounge in LHR. I'm wondering if the plane will have propellers or a jet?
Disappointing that Hainan do not reply to all these poor reviews. It says a lot about their respect for it's customers.
Left stranded…lucky we could afford to book another flight.
Booked a return flight from Manchester to Bangkok,with a long outward layover in Beijing,to enjoy a few hours in the city.
Couldn't check in on line?But, the check in desk at Manchester's new terminal 2 ,was very efficient.Flight good.Layover trip good.Onward flight to BK good.
Then the problem started.
Hainan cancelled the return flight from Beijing to Manchester,but not the BKK to Beijing?They offered completing the journey from Beijing to Manchester, 3 days after arriving their from Bangkok.
Seriously?
We translated the 'offer of the new schedule' and obviously refused the new onward flight.
We had to quickly find a new return flight from BK to Manchester,with a good turnaround.Not easy last minute.Paid £282 with Cathay pacific,one day later than our original return date, but was a fast turnaround in HK back to Manchester.
I emailed Hainan ,the cost of this replacement flight,but they only refunded Beijing to Manchester.£202,because that was the segment they had cancelled.At least we have received something back off them in an acceptable time.
Lesson learned,we'll stick to the reputable airlines we usually use.
Do not fly with this airline. Poor service, bad communication, very SLOW, unfriendly staff. I flew 2 times with this airline and it was 2 times horrible!
My flight has been moved to two days earlier and this is completely unacceptable. I need my money refunded but it is impossible to contact you, by messaging or phone. Please provide me a UK phone number asap.
Website said transaction failed but ticket issued afterwards
I tried to buy a ticket on the airline website using Alipay, the website said payment failed but the transaction succeeded on Alipay. I didn't receive any reservation code or ticket number in my mailbox, and had no way to retrieve the failed order in order to retry payment.
I then bought a ticket from an OTA and disputed the payment through Alipay. In return, the airline issued the ticket. I am now stuck with two duplicated tickets with the same name and have to ask the customer service for a resolution.
In addition, the booking experience is poor as well. It was impossible to retry a failed payment and it was not possible to go back to verify the information. It was also impossible to leave my contact details when buying a ticket for my family.
I contacted the airline customer service and what I need to do is that, I first need to cancel the reservation for one of the ticket before the flight, travel on another ticket, and apply for refund on the empty ticket afterwards.
I booked a Hainan Airlines flight from Brussels to Bangkok with a layover in Beijing, primarily because of the significant price difference (€520 instead of over €700).
Four weeks before my flight, I received a message that it had been cancelled for “corporate reasons” and that I would be rescheduled to a flight 24 hours earlier.
From other reviews I read, this seems to be a regular practice: Hainan offers flights every day, then cancels them and merges passengers onto other flights when not enough tickets are sold.
When I explained that I could not travel a day earlier, no alternative options were provided. On top of that, it took days to get confirmation that I was eligible for a full refund, forcing me to buy a new ticket while prices were rising.
I find it unbelievable that an airline can cancel a flight for no clear reason. The fact that Hainan does this so regularly is reason enough for me to never book with them again..
Avoid this airline at all costs this airline is unreliable !!!
Outbound flight to Bangkok was cancelled and rescheduled a day early leaving us with cost of 28 hour layover at Beijing. Home journey again cancelled with offer to reschedule with 3 days delay in Beijing. We cancelled returning flights and booked with another airline. Still no refund.
Used AI to solve human problems, but turned out human staff was also equally as useless ;(
First of all, never again would I choose to fly with airlines that use AI to solve problems! Our flight was cancelled and it was impossible to discuss with an actual human being to help us figure out what to do with the conflicting schedule, so we settled with whatever option the robots gave us.
The conflict indeed arose, as their only offered flight would jeopardize with the duration of our visa - and guess what? They didn't do anything to support or help us, only add more troubles to our plate! At the counter, the staff (with zero English speaking skills, and we have zero Chinese speaking skills ourselves as well, so alas we cannot even communicate properly) but I digress... THE STAFF refused to help us with anything, only mentioned (via google translate) over and over again that it was our responsible to be mindful of the visa duration when we changed the flight - hell yeah, that's something that we could definitely avoid if there were a human to discuss with in the first place!
And, on top of everything, they kept on forcing us to sign a silly document about the visa stuff, which was totally unrelated to the issues we were discussing about at the time ;( Their concern was that we were flying to Iceland but why did we have a visa from the Danish Embassy. This would of course easily be solved if they could just use Google to find the reasons why, but HEY - THEY DON'T USE GOOGLE IN CHINA!!! So we also had to spend 25+ minutes trying to explain this to them, with failure of course. Everything played out like a complete joke throughout this prolonged interactions.
Anyway, the bottom line is: cheap tickets don't worth all this bs. Fly with real airlines with people who can and are willing to communicate with you. I would give them -10000000 stars if I could. Horrible experience overall.
Our flight got cancelled 2 weeks before or planned holiday and less than 1 week after customer service had assured us that the flight would go as planned, luckily I had followed my gut feeling and booked new flight tickets from another airline a few days before. Poor customer service, little information. I do not recommend anyone to choose this airline.
Cancelled my flight with less than 3 weeks notice to go from Prague to Bangkok via a short email -the email link sent out on the email to doesn’t work to reschedule flights (there are 0 alrernatives offered) or get a refund. I was on the phone lines for ages, no reply. I sent emails, no reply. Online chat function doesn’t work. No customer representative on the chat, I waited for literal 8 hours before giving up. My only option will be to ask for a refund and try to find an alternative flight, now the prices being almost double.
My 4th flight to Thailand this year. Great service, great entertainment and a nice clean aircraft. The cabin crew where helpfull friendly and did not hide themselves away from customers for hours. Probably better than singapore air
Re-writing my review after such a positive experience. Flew from the UK to Tokyo business class on the 24th Oct. The crew (my attendant was called kelly) were absolutely brilliant, honestly couldn’t fault the service. Food was lovely. Flight was on time. Business class lounge was really nice.
Cons: need to work on their website and customer services hard to get hold of but are response to email
They cancelled my flight from Manchester to Bangkok completely 3 weeks before departure with no other option than a full refund (which I am currently waiting on!) Flights to Bangkok now stand at double the price! They are said to have a good standing alongside Cathay, Qatar and other reputable airlines but I don't know how!
If I could rate them a 0 star I would, they have cancelled my inbound and outbound flights with no real reason, they rescheduled both on random dates that mess with my hotels and domestic flights, DO NOT BOOK HAINAN AIRLINES.
Update: They are processing a full refund for me which I should receive in 7 working days
Update: I have received my full refund
I already booked hotel for 4 nights, and prepare to transit only 3 hours, and my schedule moved forward by 1 day, and transit 27 hours in Hainan, wow I lost 1 day in my holiday plan
No complaints Manchester to Bangkok return took off on time and arrived early same on the return.. Staff very helpful at check in and on board.. Food not good for me but flight very good will book again.
Very bad experience. It started with a delay on my first domestic flight with them, and they informed us that they wouldn’t provide any hotel accommodation or food. Eventually, they rebooked us on another airline. On top of that, no halal food was provided for the many Muslim passengers on board. When we asked, they simply said it was not available and that we should have pre-ordered it
Flew to changsha with these lot and the experience was good you get alot of luggage for your money - 2×24 kg which is alot of luggage compared to European airlines
Air stewards spoke good English and the food was superior to other airlines
I lost my AirPods on a Hainan Airlines flight upon arrival. I immediately filled out a lost & found form that same day, but nearly three weeks later, I’ve received no response at all. When I returned for my departure, I checked Apple’s live tracking and saw the AirPods were clearly still at the airport. I arrived over 3 hours early and went to the lost & found, but the staff were extremely unhelpful, unfriendly, and didn’t speak English. They reluctantly contacted Hainan staff—who, after 2 hours, claimed they found nothing. I eventually had to leave to catch my flight. The AirPods were right there, but I never got them back. Very frustrating and disappointing experience.
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