The Journey from Bangkok was cool and uneventful, The Emirates flight was fine and we landed on time, I found transfer desk, got my ticket and had my check on bag retagged, then boarded the slightly delayed flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai about 830pm.

After a further one hour thirty minutes sat on the runway the DragonAir pilot announced the flight had been cancelled due to Shanghai’s Pudong airport being closed due to fog, So we were unloaded and promptly directed to the DragonAir desk and tickets were very quickly issued for the rescheduled 8am flight and everyone was escorted to the airport hotel for the night within about 35 minutes of being offloaded which seemed very quick.

As my Virgin flight was due to leave Pudong at 1110 am I figured I was a dead cert to miss it as the rescheduled flight was due to land at 1030am, leaving me 10 minutes to exit the plane, collect my baggage, clear customs and check out and back in via immigration and customs again and then check in to my flight to beat the 30 minute check in rule.

As the next flight out would be the following day if I missed mine I rang Virgin to try and get them to move my flight to the 1135 pm flight out of Kong instead of Shanghai but as it was a fixed date ticket they wouldn’t move it even though I was almost certain to miss the one I had booked.

DragonAir surprised me by saying that they would cover my ticket if I missed the 1110 am flight which I didn’t expect them to at all, I was of the understanding that point to point airlines only covered their own flights and nothing more so it was unexpected that they said they would ensure I got back to the UK if I missed the Virgin flight.

They then spent the best part of an hour trying to convince Virgin to let me fly out of Hong Kong on the 1135 pm flight I had tried to get but Virgin wouldn’t budge on it and as the ticket was $7,500 for the same upper class return ticket and as I’d not yet missed the actual flight I was booked on Dragon couldn’t pay for it yet, so we came to the agreement that someone would meet me off of the 8am flight with a pre-checked in ticket issued by Virgin and help me shoot through immigration etc. and onto my waiting Virgin flight.

I wandered over to the hotel, escorted by a DragonAir representative who checked me in whilst I sat down, She then came over with my room key and gave me a dinner and breakfast voucher so I shot off to my room to do some work, Cat the DragonAir girl who tried so hard to sort things out for me, rang me in my room about 130 am to say she’d managed to persuade Virgin to agree to reallocate my ticket for the next day if I missed the flight,  which bearing in mind it was a non flexible ticket, was no small feat. I was very impressed as Virgin had no obligation to do this at all so hats off to Virgin too for being flexible where they didn’t strictly have to be.

The rescheduled flight left 15 minutes late and arrived at 1030 am into gate 23, I could see my Virgin plane on the next stand and I stepped off the plane to see a DragonAir girl holding a name card up, she gave me my Virgin ticket and said the flight was boarding now so we must run, but sadly we couldn’t just run to gate 24 as we had to do the customs and immigration dance so we ran past every gate, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17… so many damn gates.. 3, 2, 1 then through immigration, then upstairs, back through customs, then immigration again, then back past all the gates, 1, 2, 3, .. every damn gate again .. 20, 21, 22, 23, and finally 24 ! YAY I was last on the flight, needless to say I slept very well on the way back after my airport obstacle course sprint.

So 10 out of 10 for effort from DragonAir, the very helpful Cat in particular, as well as the olympic runner who met me off my flight and ran me the length of the aiport twice, no wonder they’ve been voted China’s best airline for six years in a row, their customer service was outstanding !

Yet here’s me still fighting ThomsonFly for a £40 refund .. shame on Thomson!