Punishment and Loss

There were many flights between Kyoto and Hangzhou, but most required transfers. If the transfer was in Beijing or Hong Kong, the trip would take eight or nine hours. But if the transfer was at Chengdu or Shenzhen, the trip would take more than ten hours. There were direct flights, however, only one or two were available each day and were quite expensive. The direct flights were at least three times as expensive as flights with a transfer.

Direct flights were obviously much faster, taking less than four hours.

Meng Fan chose a direct flight. Luckily, the earliest daytime flight today was a direct flight, leaving at 9 a.m. and arriving at Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou at around 11:50 a.m. Even more coincidentally, after Meng Fan got his boarding pass, his airfare was refunded, and he was upgraded to first class.