I tried to make some award bookings on the QF website to see what availability came and noticed the following - some mainland China cities that are served by MU are not listed as valid cities on the QF site (for example Urumqi URC, or Taiyuan TYN, both served by MU). Hopefully this glitch gets fixed soon.
My direct experiences of travelling with MU domestically as QF Gold within China, from Beijing, within the last 2 months are:
- Check in at Beijing capital T2 is excellent, with a dedicated area with armchairs to sit on while being checked in that QF gold can use.
- Priority baggage is provided. This seems to work well with bags always coming out first.
- There was no priority seating offered for QF Gold
- There is nothing printed on the boarding pass to indicate status. Indeed, it prints out the QF number, then followed by the letter "C", which on Chinese airlines means "no status". On mainland airlines the letter "G" denotes gold benefits (more about the significance of this later..)
- Lounge access was complicated at first, MU has a number of lounges and it took lounge staff several phone calls to decide whether I was allowed entry, and then which lounge I should be allowed into. I was directed into their "V3 lounge". I have now visited this lounge several times and the staff there are familiar with QF gold visitors. On the first and second occasions they wrote down all my details in a book for various non-MU, non Skyteam visitors, and on the most recent occasion they just scanned the boarding pass and all was OK.
- The MU V3 lounge itself is vastly better than any of the Air China lounges in T3. Reasonable Chinese food offering, beer and 2 types of wine.
- Contrary to the press release, priority boarding does not seem to have been implemented yet for QF Gold. You can not get access to the priority queue with the letter "C" on your boarding pass.
- The QF points for the flights post within a couple of days.
Hope this assists other travellers using MU to know what to expect as a QF premium passenger.
