You are sick and need to fly – Should you take the trip?
You spent several days or perhaps even weeks planning that Christmas vacation, drawing vacation ideas from a variety of vacation, and have put together the best available family vacation on earth for your family. Cheap airline have been sourced and your trip is confirmed. Hours before the scheduled departure of your flight, you or a member of your family takes ill with a high fever, a worse case of flu or a cough that can bring the roof the cabin down. Sickness of this kind often come unannounced and also disappear more or less the same way. But, is it good for you in the first place and the potential risk of infection to your passengers? But, the trouble is, most airlines do not recognize this type of illness as cause enough to give you a refund of the fare, or re-schedule your flight.
What are your options?
Most of the airlines do not take sickness as a cause enough to reschedule your plane tickets or issue a refund. This compounds your problem even when you have all the noble intentions of not causing avoidable inconvenience and perhaps suffering to your co-passengers. Here are some of the possible options you can examine in such circumstances irrespective of whether your intended trip involved cheap airline tickets or the regular tickets.
Try these
You may not need to change your flight tickets or buy new ones, or even forego your cheap airline tickets. Instead writing a polite letter attaching a doctor’s note should get you, your refund and if that fails to work, try appealing to the higher level customer service managers.
Show up personally at the gate and let the gate agent and preferably few more people know that your are really sick. Major chances are that you will be allowed to take another flight without paying extra money. If this fails, try talking to some co-passengers and tell them how sick you are and how you hate to have to allow the virus to spread throughout the cabin.
Finally, there is that force-majeure clause. Most airlines take a one side approach. Understand that force-majeure can apply to the passenger too, and be sure to tell the airline that it does. When you tell them, they are sure to understand.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Do not fly if you are sick. Plain and simple. Think of other people on the plane, especially those who have weak immune systems. On my last flight, I was seated a couple rows behind a kid who ended up having diarrhea all over his seat. The stench was unbelievable. If you are sick or have been sick recently, do not fly! It’s rude and gross.