Canyons, Mountains & Vineyards

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A question for the brains trust.

Our flights were on a One World Classic Award. Normally, once you take your first flight you can not change the routing although I believe you can change the date or time of subsequent flights. If you miss a flight then the remainder of the itinerary is cancelled.

Does any one have any knowledge or experience as to what happens when you can't/don't complete a sector due to medical reasons? I will wait until returning to Oz before ringing QF as being on hold from Lima for an hour would be very costly.

(I'll also post this on the One World Wiki.)

I now have the answer to my question....

On a OneWorld Classic Award through Qantas, you cannot change the routing once the first flight has been flown.

You can however change the date and/or time of a flight: provided it is on the same route, same fare class, same airline, and of course there is availability on a suitable flight. It does not matter whether the next flight is cancelled due to illness or any other reason (except, of course, where it is the airline that cancels the flight).

So in our case, we could have changed our flight from SCL to AKL to later in the year provided there was availability and we were prepared to pay our own way back to SCL to continue our journey. Given that award flights on this sector are notoriously limited, we were fortunate to get the original flights; chances of finding award seats on alternative dates was not good.

So....all future flights on this booking have been cancelled (including our flights to India and Sri Lanka in October).

We do however get a refund of the taxes on the unused flights and we can claim reimbursement of our unused points from our travel insurance. How they are going to work out how many points to refund/reimburse remains an interesting question.
 
We do however get a refund of the taxes on the unused flights and we can claim reimbursement of our unused points from our travel insurance. How they are going to work out how many points to refund/reimburse remains an interesting question.

An update.

We have now received a refund of points for unused flights from our travel insurance. Basically calculated on a pro-rata basis (which was to be expected).

The way they calculated the points to be refunded was to take the total points for the Oneworld Award (280k per person) and divide that by the total miles to be flown on the original ticket; thereby calculating the number of points spent "per mile".

Then we needed to provide an "insurance letter" from Qantas to confirm what flights were flown and what flights were not. The insurance company calculated the number of miles NOT flown and multiplied that by the previously calculated "points per mile".

There are probably a number of variations of how to calculate the refund (number of flights, number of miles, cost of an equivalent revenue ticket, etc., etc.) but the outcome of their calculations was a little better than I was expecting so happy with that. Overall, a pretty fair process and I have no complaints; the travel insurance company have been very supportive and easy to deal with, and I would have no hesitation in taking a policy through them again.

The most difficult (and most time-consuming) process was getting a correct insurance letter from Qantas. You have to go onto the website and click on "help", then "customer support", then "customer feedback", then "customer feedback form", then choose "insurance letter" from the drop down box and then fill in the details.

If that isn't bad enough, you then have to choose the airline from a drop down box but if the flight cancelled (and chosen) is not QF, they will advise you to contact the partner airline. Problem is, the other airline(s) (LA, MH, UL +++ in our case) have no idea how many QF points you paid for the Award booking!

So the process comes down to: fill in the form quoting a QF flight (preferably one that was on the booking but if none then just make it up). You will get a reference number. Then ring the call centre and wait and wait and wait until they answer; then quote the reference number and get them to amend the details to what actually happened.

Then wait a couple of weeks; ring to follow up as to why you haven't received your letter.

Wait a couple more weeks until the letter finally arrives; then check the details (which will almost certainly be incorrect) and then send an email back to QF asking them to amend the details.

In our case, we never did get a letter that was totally correct (even after three attempts) but the last version was correct on everything other than the taxes, and as we were not claiming the taxes from the insurance company, it was of no consequence.

As the saying goes............all's well that ends well
 
Well, as long as you are happy enough with the result - just a shame its like getting blood out of a stone. Its not like it was an impossibly unlikely scenario.
 
Well, as long as you are happy enough with the result - just a shame its like getting blood out of a stone. Its not like it was an impossibly unlikely scenario.

Yes, very happy with the result; got back more than expected.

Can't complain about the insurance company; QF on the other hand..............
 
Nice trip report with some lovely photos.

Sorry to hear @Gem56 got sick and both were not able to complete a carefully planned holiday. Good to see insurance has come to the party. Hope all is ok now and planning next chapter.
 
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Thanks Jacques for your awesome report. Will be doing most of what you did in June 2019, and mostly the way you did it too. However stopping off for Solar Eclipse in La Serena Chile in July.

Doing this with family, so 2 Adults and 2 children, which means machu pichu and cusco are most probably out just due to the expense of it all.
scored flights from BNE > SYD > SCL > Lima then Arrica>SCL then SCL > SYD >BNE and slumming it in economy.

Looking at doing Peru Hop from lima for 2 days. After that I need to book a flight to arequipa or juliaca. Would like to get to lake titicaca and then from arequipa head to arrica on bus crossing the border. I think QFF points is definitely a way to do internal flights in peru, and i don't envy over night buses to get to places either.
 
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