3-19-20 - Cancellation & Refund Nightmare
/The kids are up and cooking breakfast. Yes, actually cooking real food. There will be a lot of cooking going on since Antigua has no Door Dash. The day is punctuated by walking around the gated community, swimming in the pool, making meals, and watching the TV series “Harper’s Island.”
Leanne and Kyle follow the Coronavirus developments with a macabre fascination. The microscopic virus is the evil culprit that is responsible for blowing up Kyle’s perfectly planned trip as well as wreaking havoc, sickness, death and economic collapse on the entire world.
The kids also working on their various activities and interests. Ashley is drawing up a storm, Ashlynn is reading up a storm and taking her online geometry class, John is researching and writing about the cultures and history of countries that we visited on the trip, Corey is doing SAT prep and Justin is studying astronomy while taking his online geometry class.
Kyle spends the entire day cancelling the rest the of trip and trying to recover as much prepaid money he can. He built an excel spreadsheet and fills out the costs of everything for the next 3 months and what he thinks he can get back and what is lost. He entitles the spreadsheet the Cancellation and Refund Nightmare and staring at the spreadsheet, he carries an equally grim look on his face.
He starts out with the Middle East where there are 8 flights he booked through Orbitz. Normally Kyle would not use Orbitz for booking flights but he was having a crazy hard time booking directly with the airlines when he booked stuff back in November. The internet and cell coverage wasn’t great at that point in Southeast Asia and everything kept timing out or crashing. So after confirming Orbitz actually had the same price as direct with the airline, he booked the flights through Orbitz.
Booking through Orbitz actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise as you call Orbitz and they can help manage the refunds for all the tickets. Kyle starts with the flight from Cairo to Dubai on Air Egypt. When we flew out of Cairo to London on Air Egypt, Kyle stopped by the ticketing office in the Cairo airport and they confirmed that Kyle would get a full refund but he had to go through Orbitz to get the refund.
Kyle calls Orbitz and waits on hold an hour and then gets disconnected. Crap. Attempt number two results in an hour and half wait but he does get through to a rep. Kyle explains that Egypt Air has already confirmed that he is entitled to a refund. The Orbitz rep says that he has to call Egypt Air and wait on hold with them to confirm that with them. The Orbitz rep places Kyle on hold and two hours later, the call gets disconnected. “Damn it! This is going to be really f**king painful,” Kyle yells out in frustration.
Orbitz phone infrastructure is obviously totally overloaded so Kyle decides it’s better to wait to call them late at night or early in the morning. Low and behold, though, the Orbitz rep calls back a hour and half later. The rep just got off the phone with Egypt Air after he waited on hold for three and half hours and they approved the refund. “Yes!” Kyle exclaims. That on only took six hours to get the first flight refunded. “That’s awesome,” Kyle tells the rep, “now I have 7 more flights I need refunds for.” “Yeah, right. Not with me, you’re not,” he says and summarily hangs up the phone.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kyle says, “he just totally hung up on me on purpose.” With little recourse and not about to start on another six hour refund process, Kyle throws in the towel on any further cancellation and refund attempts. After a dour day in front of the laptop, happy hour is definitely starting early today and Kyle fires up the blender for pina coladas.
It’s March 19th and a dour day on the Coronavirus front as well. The US Department of State has issued a worldwide Travel Advisory Level 4 alert advising US Citizens to avoid ALL international travel due to global impact of the Coronavirus pandemic. US Citizens living abroad should avoid all international travel. The advisory further urges US Citizens abroad to arrange for the immediate return to the United States unless they are prepared to remain abroad for an indefinite period.
“Well, I guess we pretty much fall into the latter category,” Kyle points out. We made a conscious decision to hunker down in Antigua and thus by proxy, we are in no rush to get back to the US where the reported cases soared by 40% in the past 24 hours.
In addition, California Governor Gavin Newsom orders all 40 million residents to stay at home to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. Note the use of the word ordered as opposed to recommended or encouraged. The reported cases in California are only at 910 but the real cases are orders of magnitude higher given California has virtually no testing capacity.
The Olympic torch arrived in Japan today and officials continue to insist the Olympics will go on as planned. College spring breakers are flooding the beaches in Georgia and Florida ignoring social distancing as they apparently feel invincible against the virus. The number of Coronavirus deaths in Italy has overtaken China. Coronavirus crime is starting to run amuck, especially in California and New York, with criminals trying to hijack government relief checks, sell fake vaccines and test kits or posing as charities claiming to help Coronavirus victims.
As we watch another reliable sunset over the cove and contemplate the crumbling world events, we feel confident that we have chosen well on this little slice of Antigua.
