Nepal and Tibet No More :-(
Hmm, where do we start with this one. Well our Global Explorer ticket from STA had done us well up until this point. We have now found out that we can’t actually travel the route we booked and have to pay for the privilege of changing it.
When we bought the ticket we couldn’t book all of our flights on the dates needed as they were more than 12 months away which is fairly standard. The last few of months of our trip were all booked and confirmed on made up dates to be changed when possible. As time went on and just before we left the UK, STA still couldn’t confirm the last few flights we needed to get home from Nepal and Tibet however and we were a bit concerned. We were told it should be no problem, flights sometimes don’t become available until a few months before the flight etc etc and we were put on wait lists for the flights from Nepal to Bahrain and Bahrain back to London.
I was kind of expecting STA to take care of all the confirmed flights we couldn’t get on the correct dates and move them to the correct dates via email instructions as we went along. We ended up having to contact the airlines direct (or getting parents to call in the UK) to change these, not easy or cheap when you’re not near internet or phones for weeks on end. It’s safe to say we have spent more time actually in airline offices and trying to find airline offices than we might have thought before we left. I can’t even remember the details now but we came close to forfeiting our entire around the world ticket at least twice due to lack of info given to us about the ticket and then internal airline operations.
It would now appear that although we were told we’d have no problem with sorting out the end of our trip, that isn’t the case. After getting nothing back from STA except the fact they were looking for the flights every day we spent quite some time ourselves finding and going to the Gulf Air office in Auckland that would be the carrier for those flights and managed to get 2 spaces on the last leg (Bahrain to London) but nothing on the Nepal to Bahrain.
Gulf Air told us that the number of tickets available for Global Explorer ticket holders on that route was tiny\none. A search found nothing for weeks before or after the date we wanted. Nothing at all in fact. Unusual for sure, but a fact. This meant that we had no way of getting home if we carried on and went to Tibet. Beware of unconfirmed\unconfirmable flights on Global Explorer tickets is what I’d like to say. During that visit we also found out that a previous date change hadn’t been done. Off we trudged to Cahay Paific – it was their flight but not their fault. We like them, they fixed it and didn’t charge us although they could have.
Finding this out was hard and time consuming enough. We spent at least a couple of days doing this, eating into our traveling time and of course we now cannot go to Tibet (or Nepal) which was going to be a highlight for sure (and my birthday!) We have also lost the cost of a connecting flight which we bought outside the Global Explorer (not an insignificant amount!) We’ve also had to reroute the Global Explorer ticket which we had to pay what seems like a lot of money for too. That seems particularly harsh right now as we’ve had to pay for something which wasn’t our fault and has directly stopped us from going to Nepal and Tibet.
Finding out that we couldn’t actually travel the route we booked and would have to pay for the privilege of changing it was just the beginning however. That ends STAs involvement, the next saga was with British Airways who we would need to contact to make the route changes.
