by Bloomberg 05
Feb 2020 By Lourdes Lee
Valeriano
When I boarded Cathay Pacific Flight 841 at John
F. Kennedy International Airport at 9am on Feb. 1, I didn’t know I would be
starting a journey that would be a super-accelerated version of literary
character Phileas Fogg’s 80-day circumnavigation of the world. But because of
the coronavirus outbreak, which has led 34 countries to impose travel
restrictions, that’s what I ended up doing in one weekend.
As the global death toll from the
coronavirus exceeds 425, with more than 20,600 confirmed cases worldwide,
and governments join with pharmaceutical companies to rush to test
antiviral treatments, here is a window into how the travel industry
operates in the face of a possible pandemic. It’s an individual account of
travel at a time when you know immigration doors could be closing,
but you can only guess which ones and when.
My daughter, Allegra, and I were going to the
Philippines to see my siblings and for a much-anticipated retreat to Siargao, a
Bali-like surfing island in the southeastern part of the country. (When not on
vacation, I’m copy chief of Bloomberg Businessweek.) I’d booked my
tickets in the first week of January, just a few days after reports of a new
SARS-like virus in China began appearing in media outlets. The New York-Manila
round-trip tickets involved a two-hour stopover in Hong Kong each way; I’d
taken this route many times, and Hong Kong was always an efficient hub.
The CX841 flight to Hong Kong could not have
gone more smoothly. It left on time and arrived about 15 minutes early. It
looked to be three-quarters full, which gave Allegra and me a free middle seat
in our row. All the flight attendants and most of the passengers wore surgical
masks that they brought with them. Having my nose and mouth covered was
uncomfortably warm at first, but after takeoff, the cabin air got
colder, and the mask stopped bothering me. Allegra and I and many
passengers around us wore masks the whole flight except for meals.
I had no inkling that my plans were to be
upended until the Cathay boarding agent in Hong Kong for our connecting flight
to Manila, CX903, looked at our passports and said we couldn’t get on the
plane. Only Philippine passport and resident-card holders were allowed to enter
the Philippines. During the 11th hour of our 15-hour flight to Hong Kong from
New York, it turns out, the Philippine government had declared a ban on all
travellers from China and its territories, effective immediately. That included
us—travellers merely transiting through Hong Kong. A man from Wuhan visiting
the Philippines had died on Feb. 1, the first coronavirus
death recorded outside of China.
I looked around me. Ten other people were
milling around with the same dumbstruck expression I probably wore—six Air
Canada passengers, two Brits, and a Filipina American, Lanie, and her
boyfriend, Ronald, who were on the same Cathay flight from New York as we were.
On our shirts were blue stickers, attached by the agents to signal that we
would need assistance. The Cathay boarding staff couldn’t give us a big
picture of what our options were. The only thing they’d say was that we should
first get our luggage. I couldn’t get angry at them. It was just some six hours
after the Philippine ban was imposed.
After the Manila flight took off, two Cathay
staffers escorted us through immigration, which we had to pass to get to
baggage claim on the fifth floor of Terminal 1. There we got our temperatures
checked and our passports stamped. At the baggage carousel, Cathay staffers
told us our bags would arrive in a half-hour. And if we couldn’t find our
luggage? One of them pointed to the baggage assistance counter, then disappeared.
While we waited for our bags, Allegra and I went
over our options. We considered visiting Tokyo instead, but it was difficult to
make brand-new vacation plans while in the baggage claim area sorting out the
mess of our original trip. Besides, our passports now had Hong Kong stamps, and
I worried that some airports might be closed to us by the time we tried to
return to the US.
We ultimately decided to cut our losses and
return to New York. I called the travel insurance company to hear my options—my
$213 policy provided up to $2,000 for trip cancellation and $3,000 for trip
interruption. The agent said I should file my claim online, adding that it
would be helpful if I could get a statement from Cathay saying we’d been
prevented from boarding. Of course, in the chaos of the moment, I hadn’t
thought of doing that, nor do I think Cathay’s boarding agents would have been
capable of supplying me with one. They were as gobsmacked as I was.
We decided to make our way to the ticketing
counters on the seventh floor. By then, it was 6pm My plan was to look for
a late-night flight to New York, which would give us enough time to
reunite with our bags, which still hadn’t been located. (Cathay was
dealing with thousands of redirected pieces of luggage, a baggage agent told
me.) But the only New York-bound flight that evening was CX846 at 7:45pm.
I was determined not to stay overnight in a Hong
Kong hotel. The day before our trip, the US announced a ban on foreign
nationals coming from China, beginning on Sunday, Feb. 2. It did not
include Hong Kong. Still, Allegra and I had checked with our respective HR
departments. We were told that as we were merely transiting through Hong Kong,
we wouldn’t have to go into a 14-day self-quarantine required of employees who
were coming from Hong Kong and China, new policies at each of our companies.
Would staying in a Hong Kong airport hotel be considered actually staying in
Hong Kong? I did not want to take the risk.
Lanie, my new Filipina American friend, and
I had formed an information-sharing agreement, and we called out to each other
what our respective ticket agents were telling us to ensure that we were all on
the same page. My ticket agent hadn’t even realised that many Philippine-bound
passengers had been stranded.
We got our tickets at 6:30 p.m. We weren’t
charged a rebooking fee, which for our ticket class would have been $200
apiece. On a Feb. 3 travel advisory, Cathay announced that rebooking
and rerouting charges would be waived for Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon
passengers affected by travel restrictions arriving in, departing from, or
transiting through Hong Kong between Feb. 1 and Feb. 29 with tickets issued on
or before Feb. 1. It also said passengers who are affected by entry
restrictions are entitled to a full refund for Cathay Pacific/Cathay Dragon
tickets issued on or before Feb. 3 for travel from Feb. 3 to Feb. 14.
It was then off to a different counter to
check in; it was about 6:45 p.m., an hour before our flight was to
depart. By the time we got to the front, we still didn’t have our bags—but
a call confirmed that they had been located. In a mad dash, Allegra and
Ronald headed to a sixth-floor office; from there they were escorted to the
fifth-floor baggage claim area and then signed back into the airport. They came
rushing back to the counter not even five minutes before check-in closed at
7:05 and boarding started. Surprisingly, we got on with time to
spare—Allegra and I in the centre seats of the middle row, and Lanie and Ronald
in the seats behind us.
In the chaotic four hours after we were kept
from boarding our Manila flight, there were many moments of levity and
kindness. A ticketing agent fretted that the Brits in my group had no
masks; their London return flight wouldn’t be till the early hours of the
morning, too long to be without a mask in Hong Kong’s airport, in her view. Her
thanks as well as theirs were profuse when I gave them some that I had. The
check-in agent kept apologising for what we were going through, and the
check-in counter manager made call after call to help Allegra and Ronald get
the bags speedily. We were supposed to be charged HK$120 ($15.45) apiece for
airport tax, but in the rush, we weren’t.
We arrived at JFK at 10:07pm Sunday night, some
37 hours after we flew out of the same airport. We had travelled 16,144 miles.
By the time we landed, the ban on China travellers that the US
government announced on Friday had taken effect. The immigration agent
asked us whether we had been to China. We said no, just Hong Kong, and we were
waved through.
As the plane was landing in New York, I had
looked at the plane’s path on my screen. It was then that I realised that both
my outgoing and incoming flights had flown east. I had effectively
circumnavigated the world. All in 37 hours.
Copyright Bloomberg News
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