A year and a half ago I was supposed to go to China for a trip. Long story, and it didn't happen, but I spent a lot of time researching every way to get there from here and back. I was at first surprised how few choices there were compared to flying to the mainland. Also disappointed that the planes being used were crappy. I was looking at a business fare, but much of the equipment flying out of HNL was not using the modernized business seats and features a person would get flying out of LAX, SFO, or other big hubs. Old seats, no power ports.
The most obvious and cheapest choices were China Air and Air China, but I didn't want to fly either of them for 13+ hours. I'm a nervous flier and the Taiwanese airline has a poor safety record, and Chinese pilots are not so well trained either.
Next was Korean Air, but they were flying their old equipment.
United and Northwest were options, expensive though, and IIRC so was Delta, although I think Delta was a code share.
Hawaiian Air flies to Manila now, but flying the equator it was one of the longest flights.
JAL was good, but expensive.
I probably would have flown ANA (All Nippon).
The hubs were either Seoul or Narita, and the flights were about the same length either way. I think Delta used Seoul, but it was 18 months ago so I may misremember that.
One thing I found was that flights to and from Beijing are expensive, and flight departing Hong Kong are really affordable. For some reason, cheaper departing HKG than going, possibly because the HKG-HNL has favorable winds, and the outbound flight faces headwinds? I say that because it was a shorter flight on return.
If I had gone I would flown into Beijing and worked my way down to return out of Hong Kong. Of course a business traveler would more likely be in and out of same airport.
Anyway, I learned the same thing that Jerry Carr said. Because we are near the equator, our apparent proximity to China -- gained by sitting much farther west than Los Angeles or San Francisco, turns out to be an illusion, particularly to Beijing or Shanghai, which are up there in latitude. Hong Kong is much farther south. If you are interested in playing around with routes, try inputting them at Kayak (
www.kayak.com ). It will not only display every airline flying the route but all the layovers, and you can add and subtract layover destinations. But for this purpose, it's a good site because it puts the actual miles flown and the time in the list of results where one can very easily see the mileage on the route.
It's an eye opener to see just how far away Manila and Guam are from us.
Jerry, I wish they would connect Oceania. Flights around Oceania are just a mess right now. It is about impossible to go between island groups without going back to Auckland or Sydney (or LAX), which is just ridiculous. You can get to Fiji, American Samoa, or Tahiti from here, but try getting to and from French Polynesia without taking a prop plane. It's tough. ANZ only has one direct connection between groups, Tonga and Western Samoa. All the rest people have to return to Auckland and then turn around and go back. And then you cannot even fly ANZ into Tahiti unless you fly business class. So many rules, no flexibility.
I was trying to find a way to use Hawaiian Air's connections to Oceania (Pago-pago, American Samoa and Pape`ete, Tahiti). Fly TO Pago-Pago. At which point forget any connections, so I'd have to fly the Samoan airline to Apia, Western Samoa, which I wanted to do anyway. Then I wanted to fly home out of Tahiti (hoping to visit the Cooks again). And it just couldn't be done in a reasonably efficient and economic fashion. I guess it's all the different nationalities favoring their own airlines, but it's just a mess.
