This spring break, my friends and I planned a trip abroad. We were supposed to go to South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. We bought tickets back in 2019, unaware of what was about to happen in the next following months of the new year.
The flight tickets were $520 in total for the multi-city trip. It was amazingly cheap, considering the ticket we bought to get into Japan was about the same amount. We had everything planned out. Everything was booked, down the the shuttle buses that would take us to our hotels and the pocket wifi. We thought that we were going to go 100%, so we were all super excited. Little did we know, near the beginning of February, we would have to cancel everything.
The situation concerning the coronavirus got staggeringly worse. South Korea gained hundreds of cases overnight. My family from Vietnam told me about the large, unreported numbers of people getting ill with the virus. Everything was falling apart, so we did what we thought was best: we cancelled the trip.
We only managed to get refunds for some of the things that we booked, such as the hotels. Any AirBnb that we booked only gave us half of our money back. In addition to that, we lost the money from the flight because we didn’t buy insurance. It was probably the biggest mistake that we made. We were so sure that nothing would happen, so we would definitely be going, but we were wrong. Out of what seemed like the blue, a virus popped up and is now causing havoc on the international stage.
We lost approximately $900 in total for cancelling our trip.
If I learned anything from this terrible incident, it would be to always purchase insurance because you’ll never know what will happen. Life is never perfect, so you’ll always have to be prepared to handle what it throws at you… And in this case, I should’ve been prepared with the insurance…
Christine's Adventures Abroad 