Sooooooo yeah.
I fly all across the world regularly, including Asia a lot.
I try to take a vacation once every other month and consider myself an expert traveler.
I typically go to the same places and many of my friends and family always tease me about this so I decided I was going to go to Vietnam in January 2020 for a 2-week holiday!
I bought my ticket in February 2019, cleared both LAX-HKG & HKG-LAX using SWUs.
Booked about $1600 in pre-paid non-refundable hotels.....another $500 in non-refundable domestic Vietnam airfare.
I like to plan wayyyy in advance and clear to J in almost all of my flights.
So in May 2019 I decided to finally try being an adult and figured I should buy a house for the first time. Couldn't find any existing homes that I loved so I ended up building my dream house, which was completed and I moved in January 10th, 2020. Obviously my focus over the last half of 2019 was this new-construction home seeing the build-stages and all. (I spend about 200 nights per year in hotels so I never cared about buying a house.)
Pretty excited for this trip to Vietnam right after I moved into my new home.
So last night I get all packed and head to the PHX airport......check in.....head to the AC for a few minutes looking forward to my normal meal at the Qantas FC lounge at LAX.
First class is boarding.....so I head to the gate for the short hop over to LAX.
BOARDING DENIED.
Yep...with everything that was happening in my life I,
Mr. International Traveller, somehow and some way FORGOT TO GET A #%#&@! VISA TO ENTER VIETNAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😩
SO UHHH.....yeah.....I just lost an entire 2 weeks of vacation in an amazing country, along with a couple thousand dollars.
AA took $300 out of my $1,000 ticket and is refunding $700 to my CC.
They re-deposited the SWUs into my account, and those will expire on Jan 31. The EXP desk tried to find me a place to go, Bali, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona....but the cheapest option was $1,600 with such short notice.
Not my best day...was debating whether or not to even post this so if you wanna throw some jabs I am all game.
Love this forum....love traveling...lesson learned.