Just a short travel note here on travel to and from Hong Kong International Airport. As tempting as it is to use Uber or taxi, if you’re willing to step on a bus you can get to your destination in Kowloon for almost as fast and a fraction of the price via CityFlyer.
I was going to the Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon, one of the three areas of Hong Kong.
If you’re going to Hong Kong Island or the New Territories, rail travel or Uber may be better, but the CityFlyer bus was easy and cheap here…40.8 HKG per ticket (about 5 USD) on A25 (A21 also works). My default is Uber or other ride share service, but Uber was $48, almost 10x the price of the bus.
The bus itself is a double decker and you can tap-to-pay upon boarding using contactless credit/debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay) and mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Huawei Pay). It could not have been easier…you catch it at the bus depot outside the lower arrivals level.
Onboard, there is a luggage rack to store your baggage and seats have USB-A ports. I actually pulled out my laptop and was able to get some work done during the 50-minute journey to my hotel (Uber would have taken 38 minutes).
I arrived just a couple blocks from my destination.
For the journey back to the airport, located on Chek Lap Kok island, I again used A25. Once again, $5 instead of $40 (Uber was a little cheaper at 5:00 am) but without any traffic, the ride was even quicker.
Time is money and it won’t always make sense to use public transport, but here the time difference was negligible and the savings were significant enough that I felt like the bus made more sense…and was even able to be productive and work the bus, since unlike a city bus it was not nearly as crowded.
