In about 10 days, I am supposed to be travelling to the USA for my honeymoon. Unfortunately, it was officially called off 3-weeks ago, just when the time USA announces that they are banning all travellers from Europe. I was like, ‘Damn, this is it, no more trip for the time being’
Advices from family members was having us postponed the trip. I was pretty much in a denial mode initially as I told myself that I am going to follow travel advisory only. At end of February, there was no such advisory on not visiting United States from Malaysia’s Foreign Ministry. I was following them COVID19 news on CNN daily and also joined a few travel groups on Facebook.
Before any travel ban came in, I kept my hope high and I even replanned the whole itinerary to minimise travel in crowded city and spent the most of the time in a rental car road trip. Then, the travel ban came in from United States first. My flight into New York is coming from Singapore into Frankfurt and transit to JFK. As no Europe flight is permitted into USA, the flight has cancelled.
Weeks later, Malaysia implemented a country lock down, no flight in and out and just recently, Singapore restricted flight transit via Singapore. All flights are cancelled, and to my surprise, Cathay Pacific is still flying the leg from Los Angels to Hong Kong – that’s my return leg.
Because I booked my flight via miles redemption, so it’s a little bit more hassle to do refund/cancellation. After various email and calls, Cathay Pacific is the easiest of all – full refund of AsiaMiles and also fee charged during redemption process.
While Singapore Airlines is not allowing refund of KrisFlyer air miles, only permits me to rebook without any additional charges and the date to book must happens before March 2021. To date, I have not receive any reply from Singapore Airlines until I have to called them up for detail.
For now, I am looking at, hopefully November 2020, which I don’t have good feeling about that, but finger cross that Covid-19 could get over as soon and I can get on my plane and go honeymoon!
Update 05/04/2020: Penang’s office informed that I couldn’t do the refund and later my brother in Singapore told me he managed to get full refund on the air miles. So I went to call in to Singapore’s customer service and requested the similar refund, and voila; it’s done. They’ve agreed to provide full refund of air miles into my KrisFlyer account and also taxes paid, though it would take up to 4-months for the process.
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