Originally Posted by
onlysuites
I have a multi destination trip planned for Feb. Its for a special occasion and delays will mean losses on further flights and hotels. Is it better to pick another destination? Or is Feb plenty of time away for it to settle down?
If you haven't already booked your flights, you might try to book them as one-ways, minimizing the issues to downstream segments. I just got back from Bali (we got out a day before the eruption) but were prepared to make last minute changes.
I was on a multi-city/segment itinerary. However, I booked it as a multi-city ticket that got me to Bali. Then, I had a multi-city ticket home from Jakarta. The Bali to Jakarta was a refundable one-way (tix are fairly inexpensive for this segment). This way, if something happened on our way there, we could have simply skipped the last segment of the outbound ticket and no other segments would have been cancelled. Additionally, I booked hotels on either end of the Bali portion of the trip to add days in case we skipped Bali at the same hotels, but under separate reservations. As it became close and we didn't need them, I cancelled those "contingency" nights at the last minute before any penalty was taken.
The only issue would have been if we were stuck on the island during an eruption - at worst, we would have to wrangle a bit with the downstream flights but had peace of mind for the first half of the trip and also wouldn't lose out if we had to make last-minute changes.