Need Help Finding Flights Home? We Can (Try To) Help!

It’s been a complicated few weeks for air travel, to put it mildly, and we’re hearing a lot of stories from people who are in the middle of a trip, or otherwise trying to get home, and are being stymied by the constantly changing flight schedules and entry restrictions.

Our colleague Jimmy helped my niece’s boyfriend get his ticket home to Australia changed last week, and it was shocking how much of a hassle it was to fix things that would have been easy a month ago, and I can’t imagine how difficult this is getting for casual or less-informed travelers.

As Ben mentioned earlier this week, we’re continuing to pay our people at PointsPros even as new bookings have ceased, and are giving them blog projects and other things to work on during this uncertain time.

But they’d like to do more to help in the current circumstances than sell Cameos, and there are honestly very few groups of people who have greater expertise at “figuring out complicated commercial travel scenarios.”

So there are a couple of things we can do right now, with the first one being the most important.

Repatriation flights

We are firmly on team stay home right now, and recommend that if you can stay put, you should stay put. We simultaneously recognize that this situation has caught many people worldwide unawares, and you may not be in a situation where it is safe or realistic for you to shelter-in-place for the next month or more.

If that describes your circumstances, or those of a friend/family member, we are happy to offer assistance in helping you get home, with no charge for our services (the airlines may have a fee, but we’ll communicate those to you as we work through options). To get started:

• Go to the request form on PointsPros.com
• Add “REPATRIATION” to the last name field (e.g., I would enter FUNK – REPATRIATION)
• Please include the passenger names, airline, and record locator number in the comment field

To avoid any confusion, and as much as we’d like to launch OMAAT Airways, this is necessarily limited to helping you find commercial flights that may be able to get you where you need to go (or at least closer).

If you are somewhere that has closed all commercial traffic, you’ll need to work with your embassy. But otherwise we are happy to help with award flights, paid flights, finding a rental car, helping find an Airbnb to ride it out — whatever is needed to get you to a safe location.

Changing or canceling other tickets

The entire travel industry is up in the air right now, and schedules and itineraries are changing by the minute. We’re keeping a current list of operational issues, waivers, and other hotel and airline policies, and you can use that as a resource to manage and modify your own itineraries.

If, however, you have tickets booked in the next 30 days, and don’t feel like waiting on hold for two or more hours, and would rather we did, we can help with that even if we didn’t book the original ticket for a $100/ticket fee. To get started:

• Go to the request form on PointsPros.com
• Add “CANCELATION to the last name field (e.g., I would enter FUNK – CANCELATION)
• Please include the passenger names, airline, and record locator number in the comment field

To be clear, most OMAAT readers should be able to adjust their own tickets using the guide linked to above. And we typically don’t like to touch itineraries we didn’t originally book, but we recognize that some people may just want to have someone else take care of things right now, and we have the bandwidth.

Most importantly, and we can’t reiterate this enough, please don’t plan to travel in the coming weeks unless it is truly essential. Just cancel it, and we can all regroup and reevaluate once the world slows down a bit. And take care of yourselves in the meantime — and we’ll keep providing Virtual Happy Hours for social and comic relief while we’re all staying home.