Originally Posted by
drvannostren
Part of the problem though is that my actual ticket starts like...next week, it's a multi month RTW haha. I can only assume changing it after starting a trip makes it a bit messier.
While I know I'm not touching Wuhan, many carriers are offering waivers for all of China, which i think is the right thing to do. We all know the Chinese reporting of this will be spotty at best, and it's also not likely to just disappear in the next two months. So I will be waiting for now to see if the waiver gets extended, but I might give them a call next week when I'm home just to see if they'd be willing to do it for me. I might even pay the $150 if I can swap to what I found. I shouldn't be allowed more than 24 hours in BKK, but I found a BKK-TPE J award that lines up perfectly with my TPE-SEA flight, except I'd be breaking the 24 hours rule in BKK by like 2 days. If they're willing to let that rule slide I'll probably pay the $150 out of an abundance of caution.
So...after waiting on hold for like 2 hours today, I got to ask about my concern. AP wasn't concerned about the dates he said, as I explained that my flight was outside of the current waiver date window. They wouldn't let me change for free though because neither Guangzhou or Wenzhou are covered by the current waiver, which includes HK, Shanghai, Beijing and Wuhan. I got my change for $100 + tax (I think he said the total was $105) and straight swapped, no extra YQ/taxes. That part was nice, I was a little worried that my new TG flight would increase the YQ a bunch, but that I'd save a little bit by not going to 2 extra airports and China as a country. So I'm not sure if they did me a favour or if I got screwed for a couple bucks, not super worried either way.
Where they did do me a favour was in this case I got a 3rd stopover as I was supposed to go BKK-CAN-WNZ-TPE and the reason for the routing was lining up <24 hour layovers to get me to my TPE-SEA flight and to try and fly ZH, which I'm bailing on again now. Nice of them to do that for sure.
If this waiver extends to the surrounding provinces (which I expect it will) I'll feel a little stupid for having paid the $100, but I didn't wanna lose the J availability from BKK-TPE, so it's not the end of the world.
Lesson is, call and ask, you might not get the answer you want, but you might get an acceptable answer.