Here is the EU proposal to waive the 80% ‘use it or lose it’ airport slot rule – and IATA is not happy

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• Andrew says:

  13 Mar13 March 18:54

  Does anyone know the situation with Avios part-pay bookings? Are the Avios being refunded in full and the cash part held in the voucher towards a future flight?

  • JAXBA says:

    13 Mar13 March 19:36

    Speculation on my part: Avios in this situation are treated as a form of payment, as a cash discount on the ticket price. The ticket still shows the pre-discounted price, but the payment was split between your card and an Avios accounting line. I’d imagine that the full value of the ticket before discount would go to voucher with no Avios returned. I may be wrong.

• Roger says:

  13 Mar13 March 19:27

  I am flying with Iberia who have changed my flight by one hour.
  I do not wish to take flight and want to obtain full refund, however the CS is only offering flight voucher.
  CS is suggesting that normally the cash refund could be obtained but due to Corono virus situation they are only able to offer the voucher valid for future re-booking until end of the year.

  Trouble is I have booking with Iberia every weekend for next 6 months
  How many vouchers am I going to collect?
  There must be a way to get a full refund where flight are rescheduled or there is advise not to travel such as to Madrid by FCO
  https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/spain

  • Shoestring says:

    13 Mar13 March 19:35

    IB normally give a full refund for a 10 minute change so try a different agent

    • Anna says:

      13 Mar13 March 20:12

      Yes sounds like they are trying to fob you off. Apparently Spain is due to go into lockdown this weekend so Iberia will want to hold on to as much cash as possible.

      • Roger says:

        14 Mar14 March 08:48

        I have just returned from MAD yesterday and it is now effectively in lock down mode, although officially the flights will go on and so business but offices are going to shut down and employees to work remotely.

        I have managed to get a flight change to a later date which was much more expensive than my original booking – RESULT!

  • Charlieface says:

    14 Mar14 March 21:16

    If the flight number changed then EC261 says you get a refund

• Roy says:

  13 Mar13 March 20:16

  Who is predicted that concerns will have subsided by June?

  I thought the government was predicted that the *peak* of the outbreak would be around May or June. I think you’re looking at the autumn, at the earliest, before things start to get substantially better. I’d lay odds on June being worse than right now, unless there’s some major breakthrough in treatment.

• Shoestring says:

  13 Mar13 March 20:21

  Just listening to Trump & his team – reviewing whether the UK should be added to the banned list – only a matter of time.

  But what strikes me is not so much complacency but serious lack of awareness that Covid-19 can’t easily be stopped from running rife in USA – not wanting to exaggerate here: I mean similar levels to European countries. They’re probably not very far behind UK, maybe 10 days?

  They seem to think they’re stopping it in its tracks with the flight ban and by sorting out their testing regime.

  • James H says:

    13 Mar13 March 21:03

    The real question here is why would you be surprised that Trump (and his team of sycophants) have a serious lack of awareness of anything whatsoever? 🤷‍♂️

    • Jcp says:

      14 Mar14 March 06:57

      Haven’t a load of rednecks been saying coronavirus is a hoax?

      • Chrisasaurus says:

        14 Mar14 March 12:04

        No I think that was shoestring?

  • meta says:

    13 Mar13 March 21:23

    He’s been talking the same thing about Japan for the last two weeks.

  • Oh Matron! says:

    13 Mar13 March 23:28

    I’ve been in the US for two days (Boston, but on the train to NYC as we speak)

    The local trader joes was empty. Most conversations I over heard contained corona.

    The aloft was empty.

    There were NO hand sanitizers anywhere.

    There was tonnes of digital signage, though, telling people to be careful.

    The news reports were full of “concern”

    Will be interesting to see what the dbl tree times square occupancy will be.

    I am looking forward to getting some excellent photos 🙂

  • Will says:

    14 Mar14 March 00:45

    Stopping flights alone won’t solve the problem but in the reverse taking domestic measures to contain it whilst allowing people from heavily infected countries to arrive and love in the community also isn’t going to be effective.

    Trump has been appalling so far on this but I think the travel ban is sound at this stage.

    This talk of herd immunity is really worrying.

    The WHO report on China basically said 15% of cases need oxygen, another 5% need ICU respiration for 2-6 weeks. If you do that the mortality rate is low, without that it’s about 5%.

    So if you overwhelm ICU you get lots of dead people.

    Herd immunity would need 60% infected. Thats about 40 million in the UK.

    If 5% need ICU that’s 2 million needing ICU for and average of 4 weeks, so you need 8 million ICU hospital bed weeks. Even to accomplish that over 2 years it’s 75,000 ICU beds constantly for 2 years.

    There are about 5000, of which maybe 1000 are available. You can probably scale that up but not by 15 times or for that long.

    Then should it mutate significantly you can start over again.

    Right now China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea are the only models that can produce acceptable mortality rates which means long term big change in lifestyle, then you play for a vaccine.

    • Shoestring says:

      14 Mar14 March 07:09

      on CNN just now a US health expert said there are 60,000 ICU beds and that they could squeeze that to 80,000 by converting surgeries etc to extra beds – obvs they couldn’t magic up respirators, though

    • Will says:

      14 Mar14 March 18:28

      Having a limited number of infections for a long time is far less of a mutation risk than mass infections.

      Every replication is a mutation risk, thus the more instances of the virus you create the more chance of infection.

      So the herd immunity theory is very dangerous from two perspectives:
      1. No health system can cope with 60% infection rate of 5% of those infected need ICU. You are saying we’re going to allow 5% of the population to die. (Cheap houses, yay)
      2. We know so little about this virus that it’s completely irresponsible to risk a mutation by allowing it to replicate in millions of people. You could literally do it all only to have a new strain cause the same (or worse) problems all over again. Spanish glue got worse after a mutation and we really don’t understand how or why it mutated to a deadly version and then how or why that proliferated.

      China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea got it under control. The strategy must be to do the same then hold out for a vaccine.

      You don’t have to be in lockdown to keep it under, you just have to cut back on social interactions and act fast if you get a new cluster.

      • Shoestring says:

        14 Mar14 March 18:38

        yep my father has obvs worked out that the current strategy might be good for others/ the economy (it probably is, barring an effective vaccine next year) – but it’s pretty bad for him personally – 80 and rather unhealthy eg late onset diabetes, no exercise, 1 amputation already (only a big toe!)

        he has announced today he’s self isolating/ locking himself away for 2 weeks now and it seems obvs he will turn it into a repeating 2 weeks until Covid-19 retreats

        he’s quite anti-social anyway ie prefers his own company/ computer/ books/ TV so not exactly a hardship & quite sensible

      • Will says:

        15 Mar15 March 09:44

        I’m trying not to be sensationalist about this and stick to what the WHO have both found and are advising and I’m in disbelief how the U.K. government is in direct contradiction to it.

        The WHO have been issuing statements for a month now on China buying the world time and the world needing to prepare, so little was done and understood. If you allow this virus to proliferate there is not a healthcare system in the world that can cope. Anyone who does not impose measures to contain it will turn into Wuhan.

        There’s a lot of very clever people worldwide trying to figure this virus out right now but the uncomfortable truth is that it’s going to take a long time to do so and really no one can ever speak on the probability of mutation and the outcome of a mutation with any certainty.

  • BlueThroughCrimp says:

    14 Mar14 March 01:26

    Where does he have Golf Courses?

  • Shoestring says:

    14 Mar14 March 07:16

    so in Italy the first case of Covid-19 was identified on 23 February – yesterday the death toll hit over 12450

    now – what makes USA think it won’t follow a similar trajectory? even if they’ve slowed it/ flattened the curve with the travel ban, they’re still charting a similar course, just that we can’t see it yet because the number of tests is so low

    • Shoestring says:

      14 Mar14 March 07:17

      *1250

    • TGLoyalty says:

      14 Mar14 March 14:00

      Reading reputable news source they believe people showing symptoms were arriving in northern Italian hospitals and not being tested, and therefore no investigation into where they’d been and isolating any close contacts etc

      There is proof one person made repeated trips to hospital of a number of days before they were diagnosed.

• Kirstin says:

  13 Mar13 March 20:22

  Waiting for TAP to cancel our flights from the UK to US via Portugal in 2 weeks, at the moment they will only date change which is as useful as a chocolate fire guard! I’m holding out changing to the last minute in the hope they are cancelled to get £ back rather than just a date change given our insurers current stance!

• Paul says:

  14 Mar14 March 00:53

  Price gauging already in play. That’s why the book with confidence policy has flopped

  • Secret Squirrel says:

    14 Mar14 March 14:32

    Agree, just received a Google flight tracker email. Previous price £1056, today’s price £2356. 😲

• Paul says:

  14 Mar14 March 00:55

  The one good thing that will come out of this catastrophe is the end of his presidency. The US and global economy will tank and as the saying goes… its the economy stupid!

• Philip says:

  14 Mar14 March 06:42

  Blimey, this article has smoked out a whole bunch of people suffering from full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome.

  Perhaps folk should stick to discussing practical travel issues here, and rehearse their political opinions on other more appropriate websites.

  • Anna says:

    14 Mar14 March 07:07

    Problem is, Trump has an awful lot of power over travel right now…

    • mvcvz says:

      14 Mar14 March 11:24

      he’s had precisely the same level of power over travel since he was elected. He’s simply now exercising that power. Keep up dear..

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