Opinion | Hong Kong flight worries, quarantine hotels booked out – I need a holiday to recover from planning my trip
- Hong Kong airport is bleak, flights out are scarce and expensive, booking a hotel for quarantine when you return is hard – if your flight back isn’t cancelled
- This writer finds planning a trip exhausting, let alone explaining to family why the city with the world’s highest Covid death rate requires arrivals to isolate
Remember in the olden days – a little over two years ago – when travel was something you did for fun? Not now, not if you’re in Hong Kong.
And if you plan on returning to Hong Kong, it’s a whole other headache. Anyone would think they wanted to discourage people from coming back. I have friends who left for Christmas and haven’t been able to return. Other pals are stranded in Thailand having gone for the required “washout” period, which has since been abandoned.
I need to get to the UK urgently for a family matter and the flip-flopping of policies is giving me whiplash. When I message a Cathay pilot friend hoping to find out if my return flight will fly, he tells me the crew roster will be out in a few days, “If it’s listed there’s a good chance, but it’s not guaranteed.”