pqw123, yes! Fare differences and the way they are calculated have been a long standing issue, even before Coronavirus. HA call center agents often cannot really explain differences in fare they are quoting you for a given date and route. (When asked to justify they are typically unable, blaming their IT system, it being not transparent enough. I almost believe them.)

I’ve had to use Korea and Japan waivers in the last 2 weeks and I, too, found that even now in this crisis HA have not really taken care of those pesky fare differences for us. Especially if you are trying to modify the return leg of an existing, older ticket where just the second leg falls into Covid waiver timeframe. Or, if you need to change your route because your original destination develops a hot cluster of coronavirus cases and HA is too slow to recognize and respond to it. Also, be aware that you can apply a given HA waiver only once to change your ticket.

Wake up, Hawai’i based airlines! Covid waiver rules need to become more generous if you seriously want to get us travelers to feel safe and consider booking again under these very special circumstances. New outbreak areas appear every other day and governments are imposing new bans under us every other day, we need to be able to adapt our itineraries, and levying fare differences on things like route changes or repeat applications makes that next to impossible. (To illustrate, after already forced to change my latest ticket due to Korea outbreak, I was finally happily booked all the way from Kona via Tokyo to Germany. Or, I thought so... But after latest POTUS announcement I find myself spending hours on HA and JAL call centers all over again, scrambling to do the waiver process all over, this time with very limited success.)