Airline crisis - what should we do??
 

We have booked flights with Qantas flying from Australia to Rome arriving at 6am in the morning, we are then flying to Paris with Saudi Air at 7.30 am and had confirmed that we had enought time to make the flight. Qantas have just announced that they are cancelling their Rome service and all flights will now be handled by Cathay Pacific. The only problem is they do not geth there before 7.30 so we cannot catch out flight to Paris which is not cancellable!! Do you think I will be able to claim this on travel insurance?? What would you do?

Have your travel insurance policy handy and read the fine print. Then call them and see what they say. And let us know! What a mess!

I think I'd take it up with Qantas and explain the situation, due to this being a cancellation on their part.

Since you're going to miss your connection, perhaps they would work with you and Cathay Pacific to route you straight to CDG? Then, even if you lost the Saudi Air ticket, it wouldn't matter. Just speculating. Quantas should try to work with you as they are the cause of this and they're paying to have the routes taken over. Whether they will or not, I don't know.

Will let you know what outcome I get, thanks.

If you have a single ticket that has both the OZ-Rome and Rome-Paris flights, then you have no problem: contact the people who issued the ticket, and they must find a way to get you to Paris.

On the other hand, if you have two separate tickets, one going Oz-Rome and the other going Rome-Paris, it is not so simple. If Qantas issued the Oz-Rome ticket, you could call them and ask to depart on the previous day.

i assume that you bought these 2 tickets seperately? if you did i guess thats the risk of doing that. should they have been purchased as one ticket the issuing agent would be able to make a change. call saudi and see what they can do? ask cathay? the other thing you can do is take the risk and just simply show up at the counter for the connection and tell then=mn you "missed the flight"

Could you go one day earlier to Rome on Cathay Pacific. That is what I would try to do--spending one day in Rome would be fun.

Yes we did buy the tickets separately simply because we are getting to Rome via frequent flyer points, and then have booked a separate flight with Saudi to Paris. Don't know if Qantas flies a day earlier but will contact both them and Cathay and see if they can arrange something, best case scenario they can get us straight to Paris. Would wait for the next Saudi flight in Rome but there are only 2 per week!

Qantas has come through and offered us a direct flight to Paris via London so crisis averted. Will now just try to recoup the unusable Saudi ticket from our travel insurers...either way we haven't lost out...happy ending for a change!

Good for you, Lesa.

Glad to hear of the positive outcome!! Thanks for reporting back to us.