Одлазак у Јапан

Well I guess the title was a little premature! The plan was to leave Ottawa Sunday evening to fly to Toronto, then catch a flight to Hong Kong at 2AM the next morning. We’d arrive in Hong Kong around 4AM (local time) the next day then catch an 8AM flight to Tokyo and spend the night in a hotel before boarding the cruise at 3PM.

Reality: We got to Toronto, went to the lounge then down to board the flight, departure time came and went. We then suffered through a number of announcements that basically said we don’t know whats going on, we’ll make another announcement in 30 minutes. Finally at 530AM they canceled the flight! We had to then go to baggage, pickup our bags and trek through most of Toronto airport to get vouchers for hotels and food. I tried in vain to make changes over the phone with Cathay Pacific only to be told to contact staff at the airport. These staff had either gone home or had conveniently disappeared from sight.

We checked into the hotel, and tried to get some rest, but my brain was whirring at supersonic speed trying to work out alternate plans. Just before 10AM I got a message saying that the flight would depart at 1030PM. That was sort of good news, BUT we’d lost our 24 hour buffer in Japan. We would arrive at the airport, about an hour before the cruise departed! This wouldn’t work as it was an hour from the airport to the cruise terminal. There were no earlier flights available.

So, what do we do? Scrap the whole thing, go home and hope the insurance pays out OR find some cunning plan to rescue the vacation. I contacted our cruise agent and she suggested that we could possibly forgo the first night of the cruise and meet the ship at the first port of call. This would at least salvage most of the trip. The first port is about 4 hours from the airport by train, so rather than get depressed about the whole thing maybe we could turn it into an adventure.

Well the previous paragraph was written about 7 hours ago, we still have had no response from Princess on whether we are allowed to join the ship at the next port. The problem seems to be that the port in question uses tenders rather than the ship mooring to a dock. A number of requests have been eMailed by Princess to the ship, but so far no response.

We are now at the point where we have about an hour to make the decision whether to fly or not. If we don’t receive a positive response from Princess in that time frame, it’s back home!

I finally managed to get a little more information from Princess. There was a reason that they had not received the go-ahead for our pickup. Someone planted a large typhoon off the coast of Japan. It was quite possible that sea conditions would not be safe for tender operations to and from the shore. In addition, there was doubt that the ship would follow it’s original itinerary if the typhoon got in the way!!

With all that had been going against us so far the the typhoon was the final nail in the coffin, some one somewhere was telling us not to go!! Cruise was canceled, flights were canceled and we bought ticket back to Ottawa!

The only silver lining so far is that I have trip interruption / cancellation insurance, and after talking to the broker we will likely get a refund on both the cruise and the flights PLUS we should also get $1000 each in compensation from the airline, as it was a technical fault on the aircraft that caused the problem. That cause is specifically mentioned in Cathay’s Terms and Conditions as a valid reason for compensation! We’ll wait and see on that one!

All things being equal,we’ll be heading off to Scandinavia and England in June.