I flew on Air China's FCO (Rome Fiumicino) to PEK (Beijing Capital) route Economy Class. The plane was an Airbus A330, which is a fairly big plane. I would leave Rome in the evening and arrive in Beijing in the early afternoon. The flight was about 11 hours. It was probably the first flight I would ever fly from Europe to Asia, which is really cool. I also thought I got a moderate deal from them. The airline ticket counter might be hard to find in Rome's airport, so you may have to check with Alitalia since Air China codeshares with that airline as well for this route.
The food was actually good on the flight. Definitely not as good as the food on Cathay Pacific's flights, but I remember getting a Beef and Rice dish, and the beef was actually tender and the peppers were decent. Rice seemed to be nice, soft and hot enough as if the rice came out of a rice cooker. The egg breakfast they served was just okay and it really tasted like processed food.
Flight attendants can speak English, but it's very passable and sometimes incomprehensible. They were courteous and polite. They cannot speak Italian which might be difficult for the Italian passengers who do not know English or Mandarin Chinese. There was an incident on the flight where a passenger who was sitting close to me could only speak Italian and French and she had trouble communicating with the flight attendants. I had to do some minor translation work for the lady, since I knew some French.
There was some turbulence, but I was able to get some sleep throughout most of the flight. They do offer some good in-flight entertainment options, a good selection of "on-demand" international films from all over the world, but mostly American and Chinese films. The remote control was a tiny bit difficult to use, but I did not use it often, mainly to check to see where the plane was. Once cool thing is that you could view the plane take off and land from the "cockpit camera". I have not seen this feature since flying on Swiss International Airlines.
Overall, I had a decent flight and I did not feel any jet lag when I arrived in Beijing. This is probably the airline I could turn to if I really wanted to fly to Beijing, particularly from Europe, since they offer some decent deals. read more