08/05/2017

Day 0: Limbo

Thursday 6 - Friday 7 April 2017

Continues from Spring 2017 Japan Trip Itinerary

So!

Jetstar cancelled my flight! No Japan today! No Japan tomorrow!

I was booked to fly out at 10:45 on Thursday, 6 April 2017 so woke up at 5am and made the long trip down to the Gold Coast.

Everything seemed fine until 9:30am when we found that we'd been delayed 2 hours.

I was pretty upset by this as I had been hoping to try and see the Chidorigafuchi cherry blossom illuminations. Tonight was the last night and since they remained lit up until 22:00 and the plane lands at 7pm, I had a decent chance of making it.

A two hour delay though? Forget it.

So we all sat and waited 2 hours, and then!

Cancelled. No flights to Tokyo today.

This is my third cancelled flight in about four years, which has gotta be higher than average considering I only fly once or twice a year. Once with Qantas, once with Air New Zealand and this time Jetstar.

Jetstar definitely handled it the worst out of all the airlines.

Air New Zealand put us up in a hotel for the night and we flew out ASAP the next morning on a special flight.

Qantas let us know beforehand by phone (it was due to a snowpocalypse) and rebooked us onto a different flight the next day.

Jetstar made us all wait in line for ages and when we got to the desk the options were bad. I only had carry on, so was pretty close to the front but was only given the option of flying out Sunday (3 days later) or flying to Melbourne Friday night (2000km in the wrong direction), then back up to Cairns, then from Cairns to Tokyo. Once those filled up I think they started just giving out refunds.

Luckily I managed to log in online before getting to the counter and change my flight to a direct Saturday flight (not possible 20mins later).

Still, that's a two day delay. 

Jetstar were going to pay for one hotel night at the gold coast, but not two. So I ended up opting to just go home and try again Saturday.

Since I'd lost two days I decided to forget about skiing and luckily found a nice AirBnB in Tokyo instead. I used the time on Friday to redo the itinerary a bit.

Continue reading: JT7: Flight and Tokyo

Last itinerary revision:


No comments:

Post a Comment