The Chinese have a greeting "May you live in interesting times". We are all living through an interesting and unprecedented time, and I want to share our experience and what we learned.
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Early in February my husband Rick and I, both in our late 60s, left Australia for a six week holiday in South America. We flew to Guayaquil in Ecuador via Santiago with Latam Airlines and spent a week on the Galapagos Islands, a truly magical place.
From Quito, we flew to Guayana, a more undeveloped country in South America. We were there for less than three weeks, and on the few occasions we were able to access the internet we tracked the course of the coronavirus as it spread around the world. At that point it hadn't reached South America.
On March 14 we flew back into Quito with two friends from our Guyana trip. That day, the Ecuadorian government announced it would be shutting Quito International Airport the following Friday, March 20.
We spoke to airline representatives who assured us that all flights until then would go as planned, and we decided to finish our holiday - our homeward flights were both booked for Thursday March 19.
Two days later I received an email from my travel agent in Sydney advising that Santiago airport would be closing to transit flights the following day for two weeks and our return flight on Latam was cancelled, so early on Tuesday I made bookings on an Avianca flight that flew to Los Angeles via Colombia the following morning. By mid afternoon we were told that the Avianca flights had been cancelled sometime in the six hours since I'd booked.
The Sydney travel agent next advised us that Latam would resume flying on April 6, so we booked seats on those flights. A day later flights from April 6 were cancelled but flights became available on March 27, so we changed our tickets once again. On March 23 I checked the Latam website to find that all those flights from 27th through until 31st March had disappeared - cancelled once again.
We could see from our hotel at the airport that every two days a KLM flight from Amsterdam and an Air France flight from Paris came into Quito as a 'ferry' service - empty of passengers arriving, full leaving - but I hadn't been able to log onto their respective websites to book seats.
At his point, I contacted Windsong Travel in Bellingen, and James took up our case. Within a short time, he got us flights on that evening's Air France flight to Paris, with connections on Etihad to Sydney via Abu Dhabi. It seems that a good travel agent has access to flights that a passenger attempting an online booking doesn't.
Minutes later we left our hotel and some 16 hours later arrived at Paris airport for a four-hour transit. An hour before our Etihad flight was due to leave we were advised that we couldn't board as Abu Dhabi had announced it was closing its airport the following night and the Sydney connection had been cancelled.
We couldn't leave Paris airport as France's borders were closed to foreigners, so we slept that night on the floor in the transit area (absolutely a not to be repeated experience), and next morning James arranged flights on Qatar to Sydney via Doha. To my enormous relief these flights went ahead, and some 24 hours later we arrived in Sydney. Quarantine for two weeks has been a joy!!
I learned some important lessons. The first is that you must have a credit card or other access to funds for unexpected emergencies (multiple flight payments in our case - even though flights were cancelled, payments for them were not, and we have to wait for weeks for refunds). Travel insurance companies won't react quickly. We had to be able to pay for our tickets on the spot.
The second lesson that I learned is that a reliable travel agent is a godsend. We would still be in Quito without the assistance of Windsong Travel.
Of course we contacted everyone we could think of - multiple embassies in South America, consulates, our local Member, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, and about six other MPs. Our government didn't respond, but the embassies' advice was to get out by commercial means as the government wasn't going to help.
The help we wanted was for a commercial flight to be facilitated, not paid for by the government. We managed to get ourselves out, but there are many others still stuck all around the world. So the third and final lesson is that an Australian passport is not a guarantee of help overseas if you are in trouble. In an emergency, the only person you can rely on is yourself.