Stranded in Asia: Travellers Blame Airlines for Premature Cancellations
With hundreds of thousands of international travellers stranded in Asia because of cancelled flights and border closures due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, many have struggled to find flights home or have grappled with the difficult decision of whether to stay put in Asia for the duration of the pandemic.
It is estimated that at around the start of April 2020 there may have been up to 600,000 tourists of different nationalities stranded in Asia. Online travel forums became swamped with people looking for advice on how best to get home. Armchair travellers and trolls were active on the forums too, criticising and often insulting those travellers for leaving it too late to return.
But as one American traveller on a forum in Japan explained in defence of that criticism: “Here in Japan it was life as normal, our president was telling us everything was under control and the pandemic would be over by Easter, and different countries were giving contradictory advice, so it was hard for couples like us, moving around from place to place, to understand what was really going on — especially when you are on vacation and not monitoring news as often as you would back home”.
Many other stranded travellers have said that initially the advice from their governments was no more than a “reconsider your need to travel” type communication. But then no sooner had their governments started to make firm recommendations that travellers return home, airlines started cancelling flights with little advance notice. In many cases, travellers were arriving at airports for their flights home, only to be advised that their flights had been cancelled and with airline staff offering no alternative booking options.
In some cases, travellers were in remote locations where news of how fast the pandemic was spreading was slow to reach them. By the time these travellers returned to ‘civilisation’ they were discovering that towns and cities were already imposing quarantine lockdowns, making it difficult to get to airports from which they could take alternative flights back to their home countries.
The biggest difficulty that travellers reported was that it was impossible to get through to most airlines or travel agents on the phone, they weren’t answering emails, and for many the only option was to book a new flight through an airline’s website — if they were still flying.
Many complained that they had received no refund on their original flights. Cebu Pacific, a domestic airline in the Philippines that also operates regional flights to Southeast Asian destinations, was advising travellers who turned up for cancelled flights that refunds would only be made after “3-4 billing cycles”. Some then booked alternative flights on other airlines only to find those were subsequently cancelled, and then had to make third or fourth bookings without knowing if or when they would ever receive refunds for the earlier flights they had booked.
Richard and Lula Barnes from Adelaide, South Australia, were on holiday in Thailand when they received an email from Singapore Airlines advising that their flight home had been cancelled. “There was no explanation, no alternative offers, no refunds, just an email,” Richard said. “I tried for about two hours to call them, but there was so much waiting I gave up.”
They re-booked new flights back to Melbourne with Thai Airways which cost more one way than their original return trip, but then the same thing happened — they received an email from Thai Airways advising that their flight had been cancelled with no offers of alternative flights or information about refunds.
In the end Richard and Lula managed to get back to Sydney (where they are now in a hotel on a government imposed 14-day quarantine period) on scheduled flights operated by Qatar Airways via Doha which cost them A$2,500 each. At the end of this week they will fly to Adelaide (which will cost them another $300) where they will be subject to another 14 days self-quarantine at home.
John Grimwade of Naracoorte was another South Australian traveller who received advice from Singapore Airlines that his flight home from Manila had been cancelled the night before he was due to leave on 28 March. He also was given no alternative options or information about whether he would receive a refund.
He is still stranded in the Philippines but has been able to secure a seat on a repatriation flight this week arranged by the Australian government to be operated by Philippine Airlines. His ticket price of A$1,141 is not as high as many others have paid, but it will be an expensive trip if he doesn’t receive a refund from Singapore Airlines.
The premature cancelling of flights, the lack of assistance from airline staff at airports, and the difficulty reaching any reservations or sales agents was the biggest complaint among those travellers trying to return home.
The second most cited complaint from stranded travellers was the difficulty reaching their embassies or consulates, and the lack of satisfactory responses from those when travellers tried to find out what assistance was being provided to stranded travellers to help them return home.
Fortunately, that situation improved over a period of a few weeks as governments started to realise the magnitude of the problem and just how many travellers were stranded around the world. Many countries started to organise ‘repatriation flights’ for their citizens. These were flights where the government would charter an aircraft to bring citizens home, with passengers paying a fare based on how many seats were filled. In most cases the fares were at least double normal one-way fares because often the aircraft would travel empty to the pick-up airport as it was not a scheduled flight.
Middle Eastern and Japanese airlines continued to operate scheduled flights to different parts of the world, but as passenger loads decreased, fares increased. Many travellers were complaining that they were paying up to US$5,000 for a one-way economy seat to return home. The only consolation was that many of those flights were only carrying 30-40 passengers at a time, enabling travellers to continue exercising social distancing on the flight.
At the end of March, the British government estimated that there were still about 300,000 Britons stranded around the world and committed £75 million to organise repatriation flights to bring those tourists home. In the first two weeks of April, there has been a steady stream of repatriation flights to London from all over Asia. The BBC reported that passengers had to pay up to £1,000 for a seat, but when planes were filled the cost was less -- often only about double a normal commercial flight ticket.
That wasn’t the case in other parts of the world. The New Zealand government organised a charter flight to get stranded Kiwis out of India, but Radio New Zealand reported that some were turning down the opportunity because they couldn’t afford the NZ$5,000 one-way fare that the New Zealand government was asking. Instead they decided to take their chances trying to find commercial flights because they couldn’t afford the charter cost.
European nations were the fastest to organise repatriation flights, but they weren’t without their problems. One Dutch traveller, Maarten Cox from Amsterdam, said the Netherlands government was initially slow to respond. He said he and about 100 other Dutch citizens stranded on Cebu in the Philippines were watching travellers from Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland depart on repatriation flights organised by those countries, but even though there were vacant seats, they couldn’t get on those flights because of a lack of coordination between European countries.
He said there were considerable shortcomings in communications from government officials in the Netherlands. Advice was often unclear and contradictory, so stranded travellers were having to keep themselves informed of developments through WhatsApp groups.
And then when the Netherlands eventually organised flights for them, there were still many citizens from Belgium who were left behind even though the flight to Amsterdam had about 100 empty seats. He said that with better coordination between countries, costs could have been saved, CO2 emissions would have been less, and travellers would have been repatriated more quickly and efficiently.
Some countries have been more proactive in helping tourists get home. In India, for example, the Ministry of Tourism set up an assistance portal at www.strandedinindia.com about a week ago to help foreign tourists get in touch with their embassies or consulates in India, provide information on available flights out of India, and to issue transit permits to enable visitors to leave their lockdown locations and travel to airports.
In the first 5 days of operation, the portal had over 700 registrations, and ‘nodal officers’ appointed by the Ministry of Tourism in each state and union territory are working through the requests for assistance. They are also helping stranded visitors to find accommodation, food and medical needs when required.
In Nepal, some hotels have been helping stranded travellers by providing them with free accommodation and meals whilst awaiting repatriation flights, but in most places travellers have been on their own, leaving many visitors out of pocket after being stranded for up to several weeks beyond their original departure dates .
Whilst many Europeans and travellers from Asian countries, Australia and New Zealand, were lamenting the slow responses of their governments, those that were most critical were American citizens. Some complained that they felt they had been abandoned when they saw that the only countries to which repatriation flights were travelling were in Europe.
The U.S. State Department was encouraging their citizens to make their own way home on commercial flights, and generally did not start organising repatriation flights until it became apparent that large numbers of Americans were stranded in a particular country with no available commercial flights to bring them out.
However, around 10 April, the U.S. became the country with the highest number of deaths from Covid-19, forcing many Americans to reconsider whether they should return home or stay where they were. For most that was a highly personal decision based on many factors including whether they had the funds to support an extended stay overseas, family commitments back home, the availability of local accommodation and food, and the availability and quality of health care in the event that they got sick.
For Tom and Martha Johnson, retirees from Albany, New York, who were on an around-the-world trip, the decision was initially a difficult one. They were on Siquijor Island in the Philippines when they were notified that both their flights to Manila and onto Vietnam the following week had been cancelled. They decided to stay put and see out the pandemic on Siquijor.
“It was a difficult decision to make at the time given our ages,” Tom said. “But now there is no way we would consider returning to New York which has become the epicentre of the pandemic, and I can’t think of anywhere else in the world better than a quiet tropical island to be stranded for a couple of months”.
The resort where Tom and Martha are staying has given them a 50 percent discount on their accommodation and has set up a barbeque area on the beach for the few guests who are left to cook their own meals if they wish. Tom acknowledged that the lack of good health care facilities was a risk, but it was one that they were prepared to take given that no cases of Covid-19 have been reported on the island.
Tony Pycroft, a British expat living in Cambodia, who was also in the Philippines on holiday, decided to do the same and stay put in Puerto Galera when a lockdown of the region was announced at short notice. He arrived in mid- March and the next day he was advised that ferry services to Luzon had been discontinued.
He said he was staying at “a wonderful dive resort” which had since given him a discount for a long-term stay, and he was still eating at the resort restaurant each day because all the other restaurants in Puerto Galera had closed down.
Tony said supermarkets and pharmacies were still open in Puerto Galera, and there didn’t seem to be any shortages of food, but all other businesses were shut, and tourism activities suspended. So boredom was the main issue he was dealing with.
In Nepal, local media reported that dozens of European and American tourists who went here for the spring trekking season have decided to stay on in places like Pokhara and Manang because they felt less at risk there than back in their own countries.
In the Maldives, Deutsche Welle reported on 15 April that there were still about 1,000 tourists stranded in the country, but most were staying there by choice because the Maldives has reported only 21 Covid-19 cases and no deaths. And most resorts are so isolated, that they are naturally quarantined from those places where the cases were reported. However, despite resorts offering substantial discounts to long stay guests, this has only suited wealthier travellers because the discounted room rates at those resorts that have remained open range from US$400 to $1,000 per night.
As we move into the last two weeks of April, the number of repatriation flights and international commercial flights available are reducing, but some countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam that are seeing Covid-19 infection rates decreasing, are restarting domestic commercial flights to kickstart stalled economies and are permitting domestic tourism — as China did earlier in the month.
The question for many travellers within Asia though will be can the airlines ensure the safety of passengers through efficient aircraft sanitisation between flights, and adequate social distancing whilst travelling – at least until such time as vaccinations for Covid-19 become available?
Some airlines like Emirates are already introducing pre-testing of passengers prior to boarding, some are leaving middle seats empty to provide social distancing (but resulting in higher fares), but others like Qantas and Air New Zealand are struggling because significant numbers of their flight crew have tested positive to the virus, because of inadequate social distancing and flawed safety protocols early in the pandemic.
For many airlines, the second half of 2020, and probably most of 2021, is going to require adoption of new business models. For travellers, the next 18 months will undoubtedly mean much higher fares as airlines carry fewer passengers and they try to recover operating losses.
Probably it will be 2022 before most people can look forward to travelling again like they did pre-March 2020. In the meantime, we can expect to see tour operators and resorts throughout Asia offering attractive deals on forward bookings to encourage the 400 million or so travellers who visited the continent in 2019 to come back and help resuscitate the devastated tourism industry.
Header image: © DonnaLynn52
