I waited a couple of days to post this until I had the money in my bank account so as not to jinx anything (I'm usually just superstitious about college football, lol, really!), but our June Japan trip with Thomson is now cancelled. Huge kudos to our TA for negotiating with Thomson and getting us a full refund of our deposits rather than agreeing to some kind of future trip credit with Thomson. (As an aside, I highly recommend my TA and would be more than happy to provide her contact info to anyone interested -- just PM me.) Our deposit was pretty sizable ($8,216) because we had agreed to put 20% down initially to secure 2017 pricing for our 2020 trip, and then we also had made some smaller incremental deposits when we had Thomson arrange an overnight excursion to Mt. Fuji on the front end of the trip and an extension to Hiroshima on the back end of the trip. Thomson hadn't officially cancelled our departure, but we were the only family left that hadn't bailed out, and it was clear they wanted us to blink and cancel and move our deposit somewhere. My issue in doing that was with the pricing. If we could have moved to 2021, that would have been workable. 2021 prices for Thomson's Japan trip are now $2,000 more per person than the 2017 pricing we had locked in, but they seemed willing to lock us in for 2021 with only a modest price bump over our 2017 pricing that didn't seem unreasonable under the current circumstances. But we already have the Rhine River cruise with Wish extension booked for July 2021. I thought about moving that one, but even though I'm not sure when I will be ready to step foot on a large cruise ship again, I'm still really interested in seeing the Wish being built and didn't want to lose that opportunity. We will most likely do Japan in 2022, but Thomson wasn't as willing to work with us on pricing for 2022, and I didn't want to let them hold on to our money for another 2 years if we weren't guaranteed favorable pricing in 2022. Plus, our kids will be 18 and 20 in 2022, so it will be nice to have the flexibility of picking a non-family-oriented Japan trip if that appeals to us at the time. I still see re-booking with Thomson for a 2022 trip as a significant possibility, since I really do like their itinerary, and they have the ability to design add-ons and extensions that I really like. But, for now, I'm glad to have all of our options open for 2022 and to have the cold, hard cash back in my bank account. (As another aside, I'm super happy Thomson offered to ACH the funds directly into our account. They also offered to refund the credit card we had paid the deposits with, but that would have been A LOT of points to give back to Chase and a large credit to need to work through, so the ACH was ideal.) Now on to the very not fun part of cancelling plane and hotel reservations. Hotels should be easy, since the Hilton Tokyo Bay is on points and there are no cancel restrictions. We also booked one night at the Tokyo Station Hotel, but that one is also cancellable, and I haven't paid anything yet. We have two positioning flights booked with United miles (Osaka to Tokyo on ANA and LAX to BOI), but it looks like United is now allowing cancellations of award bookings with no re-deposit fee, so those should be ok too. The flights I am absolutely dreading dealing with are our JAL flights booked with Qantas miles. Not that Qantas has been difficult to deal with, but even quite a while before this pandemic started, I needed to call Qantas regarding a schedule change with one of those JAL flights, and it was a 3-hour hold time to get through on multiple occasions! I can't even imagine what hold times are like now. And Qantas only has a call-back option if you have an Australian or New Zealand mobile number, which I don't have. Needless to say, I'm going to wait until much closer to those flight dates to deal with cancelling and hope hope hope that JAL cancels the flights first!
