Confusing situation with travel restrictions in Taiwan, can someone help explain my rights?

redchai

First up, sorry for the long post - I've had a look for threads which describe a similar situation to mine but couldn't find any. Please feel free to move my post if it fits better somewhere else!

On the 6th of March, me and my partner travelled to Taiwan for a holiday (flights booked through Opodo). At the time, there were no travel restrictions in place. Our plan was to spend some time in Taiwan, and had also booked a return flight on a local budget airline to Okinawa (islands close to Taiwan, but part of Japan). The plan was to spend a few days in Okinawa, then travel back to Taiwan to board our flight back to London on the morning of the 21st of March.

Once in Japan, we got news that Taiwan were implementing additional restrictions and any foreign nationals to enter the country would be subjected to a 14 day quarantine, starting on the 19th of March, which was the day we had flights booked to arrive back in Taiwan. This was announced with about a 12 hour window to get back into the country, and as we on a small island far away from an international airport, we weren't going to manage to get back to Taiwan in time.  First tried contacting travel insurance and after spending hours on hold, was told we wouldn't be covered for the cost of booking alternative flights. Then contacted our airline for the Taipei - London leg of the journey, which involved a stop-over in Bangkok. It took them 24 hours to confirm that they could amend our ticket so we could board the flight in Bangkok instead (as it was relatively cheap to book flights from Okinawa to Bangkok). However, in the time it took them to sort that out, Thailand then implemented their own travel restrictions, requiring foreign nationals to produce a doctor's certificate stating we were free of Covid-19, and there wasn't going to be enough time to organise this. The airline did not offer us an opportunity to change our flight to depart from another destination, or bring the date forward so we would not be subjected to quarantine on entering Taiwan.

Eventually, our only option looked like booking flights home at our own expense to get home from Japan, which was extremely costly. On speaking to the airline, they did offer the option of a partial refund on our flights, but said we would have to go to our travel agent (Opodo) to find out about this, but it wasn't possible to get through to Opodo on the phone. The flight home cost us around £650 per ticket, and I imagine a partial refund on the original price of our flights from London to Taiwan (£450) would be a lot less than this. With more and more travel restrictions coming into force, we just had to leave Japan ASAP. An added complication was that the bulk of our luggage was left in Taiwan (with relatives), so we're going to have to arrange to get that shipped home too.

Long story short... where are our rights in all of this? Is there any avenue by which we can claim compensation for the cost of the alternative return flights that we had to book ourselves to get home?

Caz3121

from your post it does not appear that any of your intended flights were cancelled, the countries closing borders stopped you being able to get the flight
I would look closely at your travel insurance and see if they are correct that you would not be covered for getting home. You may find that there is nobody due to refund/compensate you. (there does not always have to be)

redchai

Thanks Caz for your reply. Yes, true, our intended flights weren't cancelled. Speaking to travel insurance was also a struggle and my partner hasn't yet been able to confirm whether he is covered for anything (he's with Coverwise) as we couldn't get hold of anyone. My insurance (with Admiral) told me that I'm not covered for 'catastrophe' (which is what they are saying covid-19 falls into) and therefore wouldn't be covered at all.

The frustrating thing is that I called Admiral a couple of weeks before our trip to ask what the implications were for travelling to Taiwan and Japan. They didn't tell me that I wouldn't be covered if a situation like this was to occur - at that point, I would've still had the option to change my policy to gold/platinum level so that catastrophe cover would be included, as this was before the situation had got very serious. So I feel like the conversation I had with Admiral was somewhat misleading