You can win a flight to Hong Kong

Published Jun 29, 2007

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Airways is giving away 1 000 free tickets to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's transition from a British colony to a special administrative region of China.

Cathay Pacific Airways is giving away 1 000 free tickets to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its transition from a British colony to a special administrative region of China.

Your entry can be submitted through a special campaign website. Visit We love Hong Kong

Your submission can be in the form of words, images or both. There is no limit to the number of entries you can submit. A total of 300 entries will be short-listed for the final round.

The senders of all 300 will be given round-trip economy class tickets and their entries will be shown on the website for public voting. A combination of this and a score from a judging panel will determine the top 100 entrants, each of whom will get two additional round-trip economy tickets.

A lucky draw for entrants who live in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan will be held for a further 400 round-trip economy tickets to any regional destination in the Cathay or Dragonair networks.

Cathay flies daily from Johannesburg and owns Dragonair, a local airline flying from Hong Kong into mainland China. But, although it covers a small area, Hong Kong itself offers so much to do and see that you could easily spend a week there without going further and you'd be certain to return with plenty of shopping.

Thailand is another country where you'd be encouraged to shop, particularly in the next few weeks. Its annual three-month "shopping extravaganza" is in full swing. It started on June 1 and will continue until the end of August, with discounts of up to 70% and promotional offers from shops in Bangkok and many other cities.

According to Thai Airways, which flies three times a week from Johannesburg to Bangkok's new Suvarnabhumi Airport, the "shopping experience can start as soon as you step on board" - so if shopping is not your idea of fun, you've been warned.

Fortunately, there are many other good reasons to go to Thailand and to fly with Thai, an airline with high standards of comfort and service and a member of the Star Alliance to which SAA belongs.

Alternatively, of course, you can fly to Bangkok from Cape Town by way of Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, which are also worth seeing, with Singapore Airlines or Malaysia Airlines, which are also among the world's best, and avoid having to change planes in Johannesburg.

The British conglomerate Lonrho used to have a powerful presence in Africa. Now it is making a comeback with heavy investment in the airline industry. It has 49% of Fly 540, a low-cost airline started in Nairobi late last year which is growing rapidly. It says it carried more than 10 000 passengers in April and is adding new routes.

It plans to expand into a pan-African airline with four new regional destinations by the end of this year and four more next year, which should help to bring down the cost of flying in this continent.

This week it signed a memorandum of understanding to partner with an influential investment company in Angola in starting a regional airline there, too.

Gidon Novick, joint chief executive of British Airways/Comair, and Rodney James, operations and marketing director of low-cost airline 1Time, said this might help South African airlines to obtain air traffic rights to fly into Angola.

At present only SAA and Angolan national airline TAAG have been able to obtain them and the lack of competition has kept fares between Johannesburg and Luanda high.

The Paris Air Show started this week and, as usual, there is bitter competition between Airbus and its US rival Boeing, both of which are attracting orders. Airbus was ahead with new orders at the start of the week but Boeing may have caught up by now. Both are offering magnificent new, fuel-efficient aircraft creating less pollution than older models. Boeing, in its market forecast, predicts that despite concerns over global warming the rising demand for air transport means that 28 600 new planes will be delivered over the next 20 years. Randy Tinseth, its vice-president, commercial planes, says they will be quieter, more efficient and with significantly reduced emissions.

I wrote last week about Virgin Atlantic's plans for business class-only flights to the US from five European cities, which it hopes to start within 12 to 18 months.

Now I'm told that British Airways is applying for air traffic rights for flights to New York from several cities in continental Europe including Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan and Bussels. I'm told the flights will not be one-class but there will be emphasis on premium class seats.

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