I wrote about amazing AirAsia fares from Kuala Lumpur to Korea and Japan in February this year. Back then, both countries were leading the COVID-19 table with hundreds of new cases daily. For that reason, I mentioned that booking the $60 flight ticket was a cheap gamble that I was willing to make.
Singapore now has more cases than both countries combined! What a difference 3 months made. While I was prepared to lose the $60 because of border restrictions, I never expected AirAsia’s generous COVID-19 change policy.
AirAsia’s COVID-19 policy
While AirAsia does not allow cash refunds, it is doing something even better for you guys who managed to snag that cheap fare: Unlimited flight changes without fare difference and change fees! This currently applies to flights departing between 23 March to 31 July 2020 and for bookings made on or before 17 April 2020. This basically covers everyone who managed to book those incredibly cheap flights. At the moment, flights can only be moved up till 31 October 2020.
If you do not want to move your flights, you can also opt to receive a refund on your flights in the form of credits on airasia.com with 2 years validity. But why would you? Instead of flying round trip to North Asia, $60 would only book you into a one-way flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur!
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The process
I initially booked round trip flights to Seoul, South Korea in July 2020. I made the decision to move my flight dates as I am running close to the original dates and I do not want to hang in the balance any longer.
AirAsia has an automatic chat system with a virtual bot in their website where you can make changes to your bookings or request for a refund in the form of credits. After multiple tries, I kept getting errors as the bot could not find my booking from the information that I have provided.
I then reached out to AirAsia support on Twitter which was surprisingly efficient! I provided the following information:
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Booking reference number
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Passenger names
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Dates of birth
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Email address
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New preferred travel dates
I got a reply 2 days later and received the new itinerary via email. It helps if you can check for flight availability before requesting the change. I requested to move my flights to September 2020. The actual price for the new flights is $440!
Actual price for new flights
Conclusion
At this point, I have lost all optimism on international travel in 2020. But risk-free bookings like these give me something to look forward to in the coming months. What was a $60 gamble will now become a $60 flight credit, at worst. Definitely getting more than what I bargained for in the first place. Hope this helps you guys who manged to get that fare!
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