Firsts hiccups

August 30th – We have not even left yet and we already encountered a “hiccup”.
Today, our very first booking – for our first week in Istanbul – got cancelled by the hotel. We had booked it 5 months ago and they cancel it 5 days before our arrival!!! Whaaaaat !!!

Let us explain the situation… This hotel (Oasis Suites Old City – for the publicity right?!) wanted to collect the fees for the reservation ahead of our arrival. The problem is that they did not use the booking platform to do it and because of security protocols (or so we think) they weren’t able to do so. Eric tried to tell explain them the situation and offer a solution but they didn’t even answer and canceled our booking.

We contacted “booking” but they couldn’t do anything about it. They suggested we could book the hotel once again because it was available on the site. But guess what… the price had doubled!!! Istead of our initial cost which was 175€ for 5 nights, it was now 319€.

So we spent hours trying to find another solution. Most hotels were obviously already booked and we were left with crappy or super expensive ones. When we managed to find one that appeared to be alright, a review from a Spanish couple was saying that the hotel had canceled their reservation a few days before their stay and that they had had to make a new one for a much higher price… So we came to realize that this practice was in fact a not so uncommon scam from certain hotels in Istanbul.

We ended up finding another hotel (we just couldn’t pick the one with the same scam) in the same neighbourhood. It is a bit more expensive but there are clouds on the ceiling of the room (maybe it’s worth it right?!). We hope it will be okay…

August 31st – Today, second surprise (we’re on a roll!!). We received an e-mail from Gotogate saying that our flight to Kathmandu from Dubaï had been cancelled (sorry for the spoilers)… Oh boy!! Will these things continue on during the entire trip?

After spending some time on the phone with the company we were left with 3 choices:

• Reschedule our flight a day later knowing that we had booked a cheap hotel in Dubaï just in front of the airport for our “last” day (our flight leaving at 2:40 am) and that we had already booked our first nights in Kathmandu. All those reservations couldn’t be cancelled of course…
• Take another flight on the same day but with a connection, meaning that we would be on a 15+ hours journey instead of a 4h30 and that we would have to pay an extra 45€ of assisting fees to Gotogate (go figure…).
• Ask a refund and find a direct flight on our own (and the best we could find was an extra 460€).

So, of course we’ve chosen the first option… Asking the hotels if we could reschedule our stay (good thing we had not booked much in Nepal because we wanted to go where the winds take us). To be continued…

We are starting to ask ourselves if we have made the right choice spending all this time booking things ahead. Should we have just left it all to chance? Time will tell…

Septembre 1st – Good news!!! The hotels have agreed to reschedule! We’re good to go.