Flexibility in Travel Plans in the Age of COVID

Having flexibility with your travel plans when going on a trip is generally recommended under the best of circumstances. Flights get canceled or missed, site you wanted to see get damaged, someone gets sick, or a host of other problems, all of which have occurred to many of us who travel a lot. However, in the age of COVID-19, it’s a little more urgent. Which I recently learned as I had to completely cancel one trip and prepare another one this past week.

It’s been almost 2 years since my last international trip, a week-long trip to Portugal. So when COVID cases started going down, the vaccines were making the world look bright again, and travel was starting to open up, I immediately decided that I was going somewhere. I was fully vaccinated and ready to travel (and if you haven’t yet – please get vaccinated). After some internal debates, I decided on going to Greece, specifically the island of Crete.

And I was stoked about this idea. I started training so I’d be able to hike the Samaria Gorge, bought a guidebook and started figuring out the logistics of my trip. In early July I went ahead and bought a round-trip ticket to Athens. Normally, I don’t worry too much about having a flight be refundable. As long as I can change it and have a seat booked, I’m good. But this time I made sure to spend the extra money and get a 100% refundable ticket. Same with my hotels. One hotel had a 30% cancellation fee if you cancelled less than 2 weeks in advance, but that seemed reasonable to me.

I was so excited for this trip! It had everything I love: hiking, ruins, museums, and great food. And then last week, talking to my mom, she told me she saw some bad news about COVID and Greece. There had been stories of rising cases there for the previous few weeks, due to unvaccinated travelers. I looked it up and saw that the US State Department had increased their warning against travelling to Greece to the highest level, as did several European organizations.

This did not look good, so I started researching backup plans. Fortunately, I love researching travel, which means two things. One, that looking up things like flight prices and travel news is fun for me, albeit a bit stressful this time. Two, that I have at least a dozen loosely sketched trips that I can plug into any given trip slot based on the situation at hand. I mainly researched Germany and Prague but wasn’t overly excited about either.

I decided to brazen it out and keep to my plan. After all, I really wanted to go and I was vaccinated! Then, last Sunday, checking BBC news I saw stories of the massive wildfires in Greece and that Crete was at high risk of those.

It felt like a sign. At a random thought, I decided to check the United app on my phone and look at flights to Vienna. And there was a non-stop flight, both ways, for the same price as either Frankfurt or Prague! I don’t actually know too much about Vienna, but I know there are palaces from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there would be museums, and that it’s near the Wachau Valley, home to both the Melk Abbey and the most famous wine-growing region of the country. Worked for me.

The next morning I cancelled my flight to Greece, my hotels there, and booked my ticket to Vienna. In the past 4 days I’ve gotten refunds, partial and full, for all my Greece-related flights, done some research, mostly on lodging but also on the Wachau Valley, and booked my hotels in both Melk and Vienna. In less than a week, Greece was all cancelled and Vienna a go.

I’m nervous about this trip a bit. Not about COVID per se, Austria has fewer cases than Virginia, but about having booked a non-refundable ticket, and about the chance, small though it is, of Austria shutting its borders to Americans. That said, I’m excited. This ended up being a perfect place to slot into the hole left by cancelling my Greece trip. I found some great hikes in the Wachau Valley, a wine tour, and while I’m not going to see ruins, famous palaces in one of Europe’s great cities are going to be awesome. Despite how we came to it, I am really looking forward to this and I’ve only heard good things about Vienna. But my goodness, this has been a master class in travel flexibility and the frustrations of travel in the COVID-era.