You can now refund British Airways flights to China or Hong Kong due to coronavirus

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• Craig says:

  27 Jan27 January 14:49

  Hello from 3A on my way to Shanghai. The cancellation policy came too late for me but I have cancelled the one night I was supposed to spend at the Waldorf Astoria on the Bund. £120 to bring my connection to Hanoi forward 24 hours, that was supposed to be flat bed on an A350 but has been downgraded to an A321 with Vietnam Airlines. First World problems and all that.

  • Gen says:

    27 Jan27 January 16:20

    Crazy Craig! You’re even missing out on the Maglev into town!
    Seriously, one day you’ll wake up and think, “What a daft eejit I was!”

    • Craig says:

      27 Jan27 January 16:54

      There will be other chances, waking up to use hindsight would be a win!

• TNorrington says:

  27 Jan27 January 16:24

  Currently in BKK. But due to fly back home on 7th February with BA from HKG to LHR (had booked this as a separate leg using 241 voucher)

  Do you think there are chances that BA are willing to rebook the flight leaving from BKK instead of HKG to avoid the airport as alternative route home? However, I know there are few cases of the virus in BKK..

  Thanks

  • Mark says:

    27 Jan27 January 16:58

    The options from what I saw yesterday were rebook on a later flight with the same routing or refund, the latter not normally being possible on a redemption once you’ve taken the outbound.

    That probably doesn’t help you much. Rob did a piece last year about cancelling a return redemption leg during a trip – the conclusion was it’s not normally possible to cancel, only change the date and time. However it didn’t say anything about reroutes, which would be worth checking.

    I know from looking yesterday thought that there are currently no flights with a pair of J redemption seats available any time soon from BKK (though there were some from KUL and SIN). If there is availability from somewhere that works and a reroute is not possible you could cancel and rebook of course, but you’d almost certainly lose the benefit of the 241 on the return leg.

    • Tnorrington says:

      28 Jan28 January 07:46

      Thanks for your reply Mark! Will give BA a call as I’m curious to know if any changes can be made. There are availability of J seats on 5th & 6th from BKK, so I would consider leaving a few days earlier to save the inconvenience of re-checking in at HKG to fly back home.

  • marcw says:

    27 Jan27 January 17:17

    Don’t think you are able to change route.

  • John says:

    28 Jan28 January 06:01

    You can but ask BA. No particular worry about transiting HKG at the moment.

• Qwertyknowsbest says:

  27 Jan27 January 17:49

  Finnair issued statement along BA’s policy on this –

  Due to the corona virus cases in China, we have made changes to our cancellation and change policies for our flights to and from China during 25 January to 23 February 2020. We continue normal operations to and from China, but if you have a Finnair ticket issued before 25 January 2020 to or from Greater China for travel between 25 January and 23 February, 2020 you can, if you so wish:

  change your travel until 31 May 2020 orcancel the booking and apply for a refund

• Shoestring says:

  27 Jan27 January 18:50

  OK here are some stats to cheer you up

  [In 2012, of the 28,952 deaths from pneumonia, 12,239 were males and 16,713 were females. The total number of deaths was down from 32,282 in 2008.] – so that’s about 85 deaths/ day.

  So please give this pussycat virus some perspective? It’s a serious virus – affecting the lungs – & will kill some vulnerable people – the old, the young & the sick. But we already get a daily pneumonia death rate here in the UK that is equal to all the deaths from the pussycat virus so far (or maybe a week’s worth of UK pneumonia deaths if the Chinese under-reported it).

  • marcw says:

    27 Jan27 January 19:47

    Plus, if you add influenza virus in the mix, it gets higer. I think, overall, in the uk in the 18-19 fly season, about 30k people passed away.

  • Callum says:

    27 Jan27 January 21:39

    There’s a difference between having perspective and shoving your head in the sand. Public health experts do not mobilise in this way against a “pussycat virus”.

    Pneumonia is also one of the worst comparisons you could have made. It’s not a contagious virus, it’s a lung condition generally caused by infections. So not only is it not comparable whatsoever (you might as well compare it to cancer mortality rates), a large proportion of people dying after infection by this coronavirus die of…. pneumonia!

  • Paul Pogba says:

    27 Jan27 January 22:18

    SARS infected 8000 in 8 months, this is close to 3000 after 6 weeks with predictions of between 132,751 to 273,649 by 4 Feb: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549v1.full.pdf

    This is different already and we haven’t even established a true mortality rate.

  • John says:

    28 Jan28 January 05:51

    Please would you shut up when you obviously know nothing about public health and most topics other than Spain or Avios.

    • Shoestring says:

      28 Jan28 January 06:21

      Total deaths reported so far from the pussycat virus are 100.

      In the UK, 80 people a day die from pneumonia – and we don’t get too stressed by that.

      Typical massive public over-reaction and media seeing a chance to sell a few more copies or get some page views.

      I know personally that you can’t reason with an irrational wife in similar circumstances – but some people will try and use reason & the facts to work out a logical response instead of going into blind panic.

      • Mike says:

        28 Jan28 January 07:15

        pussycat virus…….wait I can catch it from the Cat !!!….I knew it had in for me…thanks for the warning Harry

      • Paul Pogba says:

        28 Jan28 January 07:55

        According to John Hopkins the data breaksdown like this, 4,474 cases, 107 deaths, 63 have recovered: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

        You could argue you’re more likely to die than recover but its way too early to tell. It just doesn’t look like something you should be flippant about.

  • Tom says:

    28 Jan28 January 08:47

    You are of course correct!

    I would have no issues visiting either country.

• Andrew says:

  27 Jan27 January 18:51

  Oxford City Council have cancelled the Chinese New Year celebrations in the Town Hall this Sunday as a precaution.

  • Shoestring says:

    27 Jan27 January 18:57

    council employee = jobsworth

  • TGLoyalty says:

    27 Jan27 January 19:25

    A precaution from what exactly?

    As stupid as the people running round tell people not to eat Chinese food.

    • Russ says:

      27 Jan27 January 19:36

      May not be so stupid, have had to pull all hotels stays and flights from LHR until further notice. That includes restaurants close by.

    • Callum says:

      27 Jan27 January 21:44

      You GENUINELY think that it’s just as likely to catch coronavirus from a plate of British/Chinese food (I make the distinction as I assume you’re not going to be eating wild bats in an Oxford takeaway!) as it is from being in a crowd of people with direct links to China?

      A perfect illustration as to why people should listen to experts and not random posts online!

      • Dr Doo says:

        27 Jan27 January 22:32

        Experts yes, mainstream news outlets no, unless its actually an expert interview!

      • TGLoyalty says:

        27 Jan27 January 23:08

        Direct links to China based upon what? The country their parents/grandparents came from and they probably haven’t visited for years let alone weeks? How many of them would have had contact with one of the 2000 people (We don’t know their ethnicity either) who flew from the wuhan area in the past few weeks visit them?

        Me and you have probably had the same chance in coming in contact with one of those 2,000 and I have no Chinese background.

        Listen to actual experts not sensationalist media

        • callum says:

          27 Jan27 January 23:19

          1. I think it’s quite unlikely that the Chinese population of Oxford is exclusively second and third generation immigrants without links to China. I didn’t attend Oxford university, but I know the majority of Chinese students I interacted with at my own one were living in China and moved to the UK just to study.

          2. I don’t think it’s very likely that the virus is currently spreading around the Chinese (or any) community in Oxford. I said it’s more likely than catching it from a plate of food – which was just a ridiculous comparison.

          3. From what I can see, the council haven’t cancelled anything – the Chinese Community Advice Centre have. Maybe you can lecture them about how their community has little to do with China and get them to reverse their decision?

        • TGLoyalty says:

          28 Jan28 January 08:03

          1) see above re 2k people. But granted students may have been home in the past few weeks. Are all oxford education establishments shut?
          2) I said they are both as stupid as each other. Also it’s the people who serve the food not the food itself these types of online posters are worried about
          3) whoever it was they have reacted to sensationalist media reporting.

• Anna says:

  27 Jan27 January 19:17

  I know so many people who are laid low with winter bugs at the moment I’m not sure we’d even realise it if corona virus was here. They’ve had to repeat the mock GCSE’s at my son’s school as so many kids and teachers have been ill.

• Brian says:

  27 Jan27 January 19:30

  OT:

  Have IHG Creation started to charge cash advance fee if I top up Monese through Curve now?

  • The Urbanite says:

    27 Jan27 January 22:40

    Highly doubt it.

• PaulC says:

  27 Jan27 January 21:50

  We were lucky or unlucky, made it back from Hong Kong last Monday and visited all the places that are being closed. Is it 14 days it can go undetected? I certainly feel ok…

  • Dr Doo says:

    27 Jan27 January 22:33

    Come back in two weeks

    • The Original David says:

      28 Jan28 January 03:06

      Hong Kong is lovely today! All very quiet – there were a total of 8 other passengers on my Star Ferry this morning…

  • John says:

    28 Jan28 January 05:54

    It’s not about feeling OK.

    If you have it, you are spreading it around and you wouldn’t know.

    If you are young and healthy it is unlikely to make you seriously ill, but you could be dooming several elderly or immunocompromised people.

    • callum says:

      28 Jan28 January 06:02

      While true, they’re incredibly unlikely to have it – so unlikely that quarantining is a slightly absurd overreaction.

      If they had just got back from Wuhan that would be another matter of course.

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