I normally don't book flights using Expedia as I tend to use Air Canada or it's Star Alliance partners for flights so I could either gain or use points. This changed when some friends of ours invited us down to Ixtapa for a week and when I looked at flights, the cost of the Air Canada flights were a bit outrageous. So, I popped over to Expedia and found that If I booked a flight with WestJet down to Ixtapa and Air Canada back home, the price dropped considerably. Sounds good, right!?!
Well, little did we know that at the time we were booking our flights, we would be adding a little one to our family. Turns out it only took us two tries, lucky us!
So, with my wife being pregnant now, we had to worry about Zika. We asked our friends, who had been to this area before, if there were a lot of mosquitoes; they said there wasn't last time they were there and our worries dissipated.
Then we went east for Christmas to visit my wife's family as well as an old college friend, who had had a baby recently. During the trip we kept mentioning that we were heading to Mexico in January and were really looking forward to it, to which the replies usually centred around, "but what about Zika?" We kept saying, "Oh, we've done the research, we should be fine", which we hadn't, we were just feeling confident that we'd be good.
However, upon our return home, and with about a week before we had to be on our flight to Mexico, we started second guessing ourselves. Everyone's questions started to hit us a little harder, "Were we making a bad parental decision?" Well, we both came to the same decision the next day, that we want our baby to be a healthy baby and that this decision to go to Mexico was in direct conflict with that goal. It took us one visit to the CDC and Canadian Travel Advisory websites that we needed to change our flight.
So, my wife called Expedia to talk about our Zika concerns and that we would like to cancel our flights to Mexico. They eventually agreed and we got credits for both the WestJet flight and the Air Canada flight. YAY!!
We ended up using our WestJet credit to book flights to Lihue, Kauai and invited a few friends. This turned into an awesome trip where we did some hiking, but mostly just relaxed (I'll have a post up about my favourite things to do in Kauai later).
Flash forward to this week and we decided to use our Air Canada credit on a flight for both of us to go out east to see our little baby's grandparents. My wife called up Expedia asking to use the credits, but the first guy said we had no credits so we were passed off to customer service. Luckily, the second guy saw that we had credits, great! We gave him the flight information that we wanted to book and presumed it would go just as well as the last time we used our credits.
Unfortunately, we were wrong. Apparently, the only way to use credits is to book a flight from the same destination of origin and since we used Expedia to get a cheaper deal by flying with two different companies, we were hooped. Unless, of course, we wanted to fly down to Ixtapa and then use the credits on an Air Canada flight back. No such luck though, we were not going to Mexico any time soon.
LESSONS LEARNED:
- Probably best to listen to your countries Health organization before making travel plans.
- Stay away from booking flights with two separate companies if there's a slight chance you might have to cancel