Cathay Pacific has always been considered a five star airlines due to the high quality of its services. Customer care is impeccable: the courtesy and efficiency of the personnel, the broad variety of its entertainment services, its special travel kit, designed by French fashion designer Agnes B. and containing excellent cosmetics of the American brand Dr. Murad. Not to mention the ultra-refined pyjamas signed by Shangai Tang for first class travellers. That is to say, in Cathay Pacific each and every detail is a sign of excellence.
My encounter some years back with Silvia Tagliaferri, commercial director for Italy already struck up a chord. Nominated a little more than a year ago as Cavaliere of the Italian Republic by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, for having contributed to intensifying relations between Italy and the explosive Chinese reality thanks to daily flights Milan-Hong Kong, Silvia perfectly embodies that high quality image associated with the Cathay brand: quick, extrovert, professional, ever attentive to authentic relations with persons even 12 hours into a different timespan! Passing part of her time in burgeoning China and glittering Hong Kong, I asked her for her view of luxury today.
“My concept of luxury immediately conjures up the sphere of human desires, something not always within reach and that affectionately springs to mind when you want to think of something to make yourself feel good. I refer to a meaning of luxury in the immaterial sense, of a world made up of sensations and emotions.
As ever the concept of luxury coincides with a longing for something that is not present but which one aspires to; true luxury today undoubtedly means allowing oneself to spend more time with ones loved ones as well as oneself, but also finding time for an augmented sense of gratification and comfort. Beyond the sphere of the sentiments, one is drawn by the non essential, the desirable and not always easy to achieve and reach.
If we translate luxury into the world associated with travel, it thus becomes expression of the most intricate and finest of desires. Aside all formality, it means living and allowing others to live an experience in which attentiveness and quality are declined in the smallest details. This is what I seek in a trip or journey and this is nothing less than what we aspire to offer our passengers: providing the conditions to enable them to fully relish a trip to the utmost potential, allowing it to become both a haven in which to gratify ones desires while leading on to the discovery of new wonders”.
