The US had its fair share of controversies last year. From New Yorkers sipping prosecco as protests raged in the street behind them to Porsche 911s going up in flames in LA (not to mention a regression to ‘pirate age‘ diets), things are ~polarised~.
Chuck in the fact that Corona 19 rather dramatically spiked in the US over the course of 2020 and… the United States of America aren’t as tourism-friendly as they’ve ever been. That tantalising prelude in mind… Qantas has just started selling flights again to the US from Australia.
This comes as Qantas has “reopened ticket sales across its international network” (also including the UK) Traveller reports, “in a sign the airline is optimistic COVID-19 vaccines will be rolled out widely enough over the next six months to restart overseas travel.”
The Flying Roo had previously not permitted passengers to book flights to London or the US until October. This has now changed. As early as January the 2nd customers began noticing flights are now scheduled to these destinations from July the 1st this year.
“While waiting for the kettle to boil this morning was dreaming of travelling overseas and searched flights to the USA on the Qantas app,” one user wrote in the blog section of Executive Traveller.
“July flights are back on to the USA – around same price before they cancelled everything around 2 months ago.”
It’s not all good news for those with itchy feet, however. First: there’s no guarantee these flights will go ahead (nor is there that Australia’s international travel ban will be lifted).
Additionally, flights to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan that were set to start up again in March have now been pushed back to July 1, as the potential to create COVID-safe “travel bubbles” with those countries has gone ‘poof.’
New Zealand is the only country Qantas is currently flying to, as part of Australia and New Zealand’s “one way bubble” agreement.
As previously reported, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has said a vaccine would be required for quarantine free travel to resume to countries like the US and the UK, where coronavirus is rampant. He also said proof of having received the vaccine would be a condition of travel for Qantas passengers looking to board these flights.
On the bright side, as one frequent flyer enthusiast speculated on the aforementioned blog, depending on the prices of Australia-US flights when travel returns to normal, you could see your booking as an investment (or cross your fingers it might become one).
“Most likely scenario is your cash becomes part of the cash flow until the week they cancel your flight plus whatever optimistic minimum processing time to refund your money,” (the user starts off bleak).
“Alternatively, you view it as an almost surefire way of getting doubt status credit or 10-20% increase in value of your cash over 1-2 years given the very high probability the flight will be cancelled plus the ‘unprecedented’ ultra low interest rates as seen by this country for a very long time, almost better than putting money in a term deposit.”
Interesting theory.