Hotel and Airline Refunds Because of Dumb COVID-19

We wanted to start off by stating we do know how serious Covid-19 is, and with this next sentence we don’t want to take anything away from the seriousness regarding the virus. As many of us current and future travelers know, our travels are what we look forward to day in and day out. For us specifically traveling or blogging isn’t our full time job, so we work multiple income avenues to assure the adventures of traveling are possible. This is why we wanted to share our experience and tips we found out navigating the always wonderful world of cancellations, rebookings, and the dreadful “travel restrictions”. 

In this blog post we are only going to cover our experience that occured within our Japan Itinerary. We may touch on other itineraries down the road, but at this time they are ever changing and we can’t give full set in stone outcomes quite yet. Anyways our itinerary in Japan consisted of two local based hotels, Marriott based hotel, and Delta airlines (Which we purchased travel insurance through their website). 

Travel Insurance: 

We got to start with talking about travel insurance. We believe the debate will always go on, “when should you buy travel insurance”, “when my trip is over $$$ I always buy travel insurance”. The tips, the questions can go on forever. Us specifically being new to the international travel game and booking about 8 months in advance decided travel insurance would be well worth it. We paid $85.30 for our plan to cover us both, but we had very little idea exactly what it covered and what it did not. 

Long story short Covid-19 forced us to read our travel insurance policy to depths we never wanted or needed. We shortly thought once the CDC or WHO considered Covid-19 a Pandemic or Epidemic we would get a full refund from the policy, but deeper findings found Pandemic and Epidemics to be excluded from the policy. 

Delta Airlines:

Delta has been one of our favorite airlines ever since we flew them on our first international trip. We also have experienced great customer service over the majority of our interactions. 

Marriott Hotel:

We thankfully found a rate for a Marriott hotel in Tokyo that did not require prepayment for the cheapest rate. Typically the cheapest rate does require a prepayment so we were lucky on this one. (We have found others like this during our travels; it just takes time and research). Along with this Marriott extended their cancellation dates to 24hr prior to arrival for this hotel. Overall we had a smooth experience due to the above factors. We will definitely still utilize Marriott hotels in our future travels. 

Local Tokyo Hotel:

The local Tokyo hotel we had picked thankfully was eerily similar to the Marriott hotel. At the time of booking we recalled there being either a 30 or 45 day prior to arrival for free cancellations, but when we did reach out online to cancel it seemed that they changed their policies due to Covid-19. 

Pre-Paid Kyoto Hotel:

We saved the best for last, well not really the best, but the most challenging. At one point we noted that their website “claimed” that they were offering extended cancellation dates. Along with other recommendations and our flights above we decided to wait until it was truly incapable of traveling to Japan. We then reached out for a refund, unfortunately the hotel only wanted to offer a 50% refund due to their normal refund policies. This was challenging as it was a smaller local hotel where the language barrier was strong. We did of course reach back out and were pretty persistent and ended up being granted a full 100% refund since we “couldn’t make it at all”. 

We decided to be vague when it came to the specific hotel names and representatives we spoke to. This was an easy decision, because we know that nobody wanted or expected Covid-19 to occur. We wanted to visit Japan, and we assumed they wanted the tourism income. Either way it all seemed to work out. If and when we get to travel to Japan we will keep these companies in mind as they truly never did anything wrong to deter our travels.

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