GMEDX, KA has a travel fund because they are a regional airline without a staff travel arrangement with reasonable priority on other airlines. They need to buy full fare tickets to get out of Asia. That's what the cash travel fund is for. Now they get staff tickets on CX with their KA priority and don't have to pay full fare to get out of Asia.
A percentage of the travel fund has been taken way making KA B Scale pilots the only employees in the group to have their pockets raided. Those that chose not to sign over, have the whole work force leap ahead of them in my understanding.
The surviving components of the original travel fund concept was far more expansive than your argument of convenience. It's a contractual arrangement and you could dive on the Titanic or check out in a Russian tank; may sound odd but KA has always been vulnerable to rapid attrition of experience. Perhaps some of the older KA guys could elaborate on this contractual travel benefit though we were always told at a management level to use the fund to recuperate. Sure, it's a dated concept, though a contractual one.
About the dumbest thing CX pilots could wish for is to cheapen their replacements. What's happening now, the transferring of as much regional flying to KA, is an unimaginative expansion though it falls under the " I told you so " banner when KA taken over. There's as much of your regional flying and rumored slightly beyond as we can take.
KA is small and thus efficient. Our command training a dogs breakfast six months ago though their seems a rapid reversal including lessons in recruitment on how to get guys to upgrade inside of 18 months on a pretty rigid course. The old issue of rapid attrition could undo these new-found efficiencies - more Captains are on their way out of KA than have left CX this financial year, some new upgrades are already looking and some local captains seem ruffled by the new free for all day one of sim which will have unpredictable consequences. But KA is rapidly being able to mold itself into what CX needs on the day- real smart to want an organization rapidly learning, to train significantly cheaper pilots including fast upgrade programs for cadets and refining the MPL to have much cheaper pilots than yourself.
So getting on pprune and slagging off at KA pilots' contract is more of the race to the bottom mentality. It will be easy to sponsor by management through the stupidity of the legacy mentality of their staff who need more than a hat to feel a needy superiority. It will be interesting to see if the attrition and burn-out of KA pilots counter-weighs the self-immolation attitude of some CX pilots. Though I have to say, some of the posters here you can smell the BS, they promote themselves as radicals, deride their union, yet appear to be fed by management.
There's no such entity as Dragonair or whatever the new name is. I've worked for airlines owned by other airlines and the KA-CX relationship has been promoted as being independent or hands-off though it has always been centralized. Everything at KA House is CX. All the staff bar aircrew/cabin crew. It's everything- I wanted to correct an ASR of late and I had to go to CX to find it. Operational independence? Oh I wish, they even try to make us fly like you now and it's only that a few of our destinations are circling reliant that visual flying isn't out the door and power off descents labelled as sporty by a seconded CX pilot a few years ago.