Who knew air travel could be so complicated?
Had to share this with someone, and I suppose that's what a blog is for. I'd advise you to skip over this post to the next one. This one is mainly recording details for my own benefit. It got kind of long.
The planning of this trip was plagued with problems. The first was when Cathay Pacific decided that the increasing civil unrest in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was enough to cancel their flights there. Now the problem with that was, I held a ticket with flights confirmed into Colombo, and an unticketed, but fully arranged, booking for my next round the world trip.
Much research followed, and finally I decided that Tokyo would be a good place to start the next round the world. It was a bit more expensive than starting from Colombo, but with the strong Australian dollar, coupled with the opportunity to ticket the trip with American Airlines, the total cost would be only one or two hundred dollars more than my last ex-Colombo ticket. American Airlines doesn't impose fuel surcharges, so instead of the taxes and charges coming to around $1200, they were only around $700. I quickly sought and gained approval from the company. As an additional bonus, the ticket could be made electronic and paid for over the phone, so no more midnight rendezvous hoping there was a ticket waiting for me.
Next step was to make sure I could get to Tokyo's Narita airport (code NRT), and from there keep my existing proposed schedule. Everything worked out and I reissued my CBR-SYD-Hong Kong (code HKG)-Colombo (code CMB) with the local Qantas office to be CBR-SYD-NRT-HKG-CMB, with the NRT-HKG-CMB open dated. I also held a reservation with American Airlines for the new round the world. So far so good.
Once Qantas had finished reissuing the ticket I called Cathay Pacific to get them to cancel the bookings they held. It was only later (almost too late) that I discovered that whatever they did had cancelled the whole reservation. A frantic call to Qantas fixed this, but I was lucky because I got the very last seat in the relevant booking class on the SYD-NRT leg.
A ten minute call to American Airlines in Tokyo, and I was the proud owner of a Business Class round the world ticket. So I contacted Cathay Pacific in Colombo and told them that since it was not currently possible to make bookings out of Sri Lanka, I would need to cancel the tentative reservations I held. Done.
Except that in a free moment I thought I would log on to British Airways and try to get some seat allocations. That's when I discovered that some of the legs of the ticket had disappeared! Long story short, it appeared that any flight which had both a Cathay Pacific and American Airlines reservation for me had gone. More frantic calls. Most were restored but my return to Australia had to be delayed a day. Trust me, this precis does not do justice to the time, effort and phone calls required to try to fix the problem.
Once all was resolved, I went through the process of getting seat allocations. I'll continue this in the next post.
The planning of this trip was plagued with problems. The first was when Cathay Pacific decided that the increasing civil unrest in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was enough to cancel their flights there. Now the problem with that was, I held a ticket with flights confirmed into Colombo, and an unticketed, but fully arranged, booking for my next round the world trip.
Much research followed, and finally I decided that Tokyo would be a good place to start the next round the world. It was a bit more expensive than starting from Colombo, but with the strong Australian dollar, coupled with the opportunity to ticket the trip with American Airlines, the total cost would be only one or two hundred dollars more than my last ex-Colombo ticket. American Airlines doesn't impose fuel surcharges, so instead of the taxes and charges coming to around $1200, they were only around $700. I quickly sought and gained approval from the company. As an additional bonus, the ticket could be made electronic and paid for over the phone, so no more midnight rendezvous hoping there was a ticket waiting for me.
Next step was to make sure I could get to Tokyo's Narita airport (code NRT), and from there keep my existing proposed schedule. Everything worked out and I reissued my CBR-SYD-Hong Kong (code HKG)-Colombo (code CMB) with the local Qantas office to be CBR-SYD-NRT-HKG-CMB, with the NRT-HKG-CMB open dated. I also held a reservation with American Airlines for the new round the world. So far so good.
Once Qantas had finished reissuing the ticket I called Cathay Pacific to get them to cancel the bookings they held. It was only later (almost too late) that I discovered that whatever they did had cancelled the whole reservation. A frantic call to Qantas fixed this, but I was lucky because I got the very last seat in the relevant booking class on the SYD-NRT leg.
A ten minute call to American Airlines in Tokyo, and I was the proud owner of a Business Class round the world ticket. So I contacted Cathay Pacific in Colombo and told them that since it was not currently possible to make bookings out of Sri Lanka, I would need to cancel the tentative reservations I held. Done.
Except that in a free moment I thought I would log on to British Airways and try to get some seat allocations. That's when I discovered that some of the legs of the ticket had disappeared! Long story short, it appeared that any flight which had both a Cathay Pacific and American Airlines reservation for me had gone. More frantic calls. Most were restored but my return to Australia had to be delayed a day. Trust me, this precis does not do justice to the time, effort and phone calls required to try to fix the problem.
Once all was resolved, I went through the process of getting seat allocations. I'll continue this in the next post.
posted by Alan at 8:12 PM
1 Comments:
Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!Flights to Abidjan
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