I got a message last week telling me the itinerary of my travel had changed and I now had to change airports in Tokyo. The problem with this is that foreign nationals aren’t able to use public transport in Tokyo, leaving me without a valid flight. I called them and was on hold for some time then gave up. The next morning, the Scientist phone when their customer service opened and waited for close to an hour while he was working. He then put me on to the representative who had found alternative flights that would help me reach my destination. The problem was they only had code-share flights which would mean I wouldn’t have the generous seating space that I purposely chose. And the code share flight was a considerably cheaper option, based on what I saw while searching flights. After discussions on a couple of days with the representative, I finally chose to cancel the flight and choose another option. I will point out this was a call center in Hong Kong and the connection by phone was terrible. Also the last rep I spoke with was so hard to understand because every time he spoke there was static on the line. I don’t fault the reps at all but the rest of the service was rather poor. Even the hold message was done in quite broken English. The app for the airline was also rather poor so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. It’s unlikely I would book any further flights with the airline in the future. By the way, it’s going to be two to three months to process the refund. :(

While waiting for return communications on the previously booked flight, I went searching for flights through other airlines. I might have gone with Singapore Airlines except the flights would be in and out of Perth and I didn’t want to risk not being able to get back into the state. Also the flights were a bit more expensive than they had been when I booked my original tickets. But I had a pretty good experience on my previous flights with them and the food was good too.

Ultimately I chose to use Qantas Airlines and book the most direct flight to Dallas, which includes 15 and 16 hour flights between Sydney and Dallas. This shortened my trip by nearly a day and the only layovers are in Sydney. On the way, I have a ten hour stop and I’m thinking of going into the city and being a tourist for a few hours, mostly outdoors. Anyway I booked my trip and went to pay and had an issue trying to use Paypal where I clicked on done to avoid the payment (there were reasons I tried Paypal that didn’t come to fruition). When I tried to go back to the payment page, it showed my ticket was confirmed and I soon got a strange email telling me they couldn’t issue the ticket until I filled out the information for entry into the US. Not that filling out the information made any difference. I tried to call the airline but the hold times were long so I didn’t stay with it. I decided to wait and see what happened over the next day. Still there was no way to make payment. I then noticed my account showed something in the “basket” and I went there and paid for a ticket. Except this had a different booking number. This time I got an itinerary and several other emails but nothing like the strange one I got with the previous ticket. My account now showed two trips that were the same except for one flight. There was no way to remove the other one. I ended up calling the airline and waited for three hours to speak to an agent. Once I got through, it was a matter of five minutes to fix the problem.

Within a day of getting that sorted, it was announced our border was going to open in full on March 4th. I don’t think I’d have been able to get a reasonable fare but it’s possible more airline options would have been available. Still I have always had pretty good experiences with Qantas so it should be fine.