I traveled by China Airlines in August 2005 at the time of the floods in Mumbai. My flight from Mumbai to San Francisco was cancelled and I was able to get a seat on China Airlines to travel New
Delhi-Taipei-San Francisco. Glad that I was able to travel at all, my reservations about traveling on an "unknown" airline became secondary.
I flew from Pune to New Delhi on Jet Airways arriving there in the late evening. At the check-in counter I was told that my E-ticket didn’t show up in China Airlines’ computer systems. For a while it looked like I might have to spend the night in Delhi and return home
feeling I’d wasted time. Fortunately, after some dialog with the ground staff they managed to get that sorted out.
The aircraft are clean and comfortable. The flights were all on time and as reported by the other reviewer, most arrived at their destinations ahead of scheduled time.
I like Chinese food and eat everything but found the food served on the plane was hard to stomach. This wastrue on all sectors (Delhi-Taipei and Taipei-San Francisco).
Connecting to San Francisco is inconvenient - there is a long wait. The airline is good enough to put you up at a hotel although the hotel I stayed at was B grade (at best).
There is also a city tour that is offered by the Taiwanese government at Taipei airport. On the return journey the flight from San Francisco to Taipei lands at a time that allows one to join the tour. This proved to be the best part of traveling by China
Airlines. Taipei is an interesting city and the tour is reasonably well designed. The tour bus returns you to the airport terminal from where you can hop on to the China Airlines arranged bus
to take you to the hotel.