You may recall we already rescheduled our upcoming trip to SE Asia originally booked for June 2023. We pushed it to February/March 2024 as we just had too many other trips planned for 2023 to take another two weeks off. When I rescheduled the trip, I was holding temporary ANA Platinum status so I had access to more award seats than a non-elite member.

When I rebooked, not only was there a schedule change that allowed me to cancel the original ANA award tickets for free, I was also able to grab two ANA business class seats from Washington to Ho Chi Minh City via Tokyo and from Singapore to Los Angeles via Tokyo for 210,000 ANA points. For two people totaling about 36 hours in business class, this is a crazy good deal. I had mapped out a nice itinerary starting in Ho Chi Minh City then moving to Hue/Da Nang/Hoi An and then over to Cambodia visiting Siem Reap and Phnom Penh before ending in Singapore for a couple of days.

My wife had ankle surgery in early December with the anticipation that she could rehab and be good to go by late February to be able to walk much better on this trip than previous trips where her tendon injury has bothered her greatly. Unfortunately, she fell a week after the surgery and somehow tore ligaments in the same ankle. Now, she needs another surgery next week. It was pretty obvious she would not be ready for a huge trip just six weeks after surgery.

I decided to target the first two weeks of April as we should just about avoid the rainy season in most of the places we’re visiting and it gives her almost three months to recover from the second surgery. Unfortunately, it’s also about the hottest time of the year, but is there really much difference between 92 degrees in February and 94 degrees in April?

In my next post, I’ll reveal what we booked for the new itinerary, but first I had to unwind the previously booked trip. ANA does not charge any fees for cancelling an award ticket, but they do charge 3,000 miles per ticket unless there’s a schedule change. Obviously, this can be a pain if you want to rebook a similar award. In my case, I could not find any business class availability on ANA for any US route in April so it didn’t really matter. We’ll now have 204,000 ANA miles that expire around 2025 so I hope we can use them before then in some capacity.

For the shorter intra-Asia flights, I was able to reschedule a flight on Vietnam Airlines from Ho Chi Minh City to Hue for a new date without a fee. I canceled a flight on Cambodian Angkor Air with a cancellation fee of $40pp and I canceled an award ticket on Singapore Airlines between Phnom Penh and Singapore with a fee of $75pp to refund the miles and award taxes. I haven’t decided if I’ll bother to claim these fees through our travel insurance, but assuming I can get a note from my wife’s surgeon, I might as well do that. I was also able to cancel the positioning flights to Washington and from Los Angeles on Delta with no problem and get the miles refunded.

All the hotels with one exception were booked via Hyatt so it was just a matter of canceling some reservations. As a Globalist, I am working with my Hyatt concierge to rebook these hotels and I’ll have more about that in the next post when I discuss the new itinerary. For two nights in Phnom Penh, I had booked through Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts to burn two $200 credits on Amex Platinum cards. Unfortunately, these were 2023 credits so I can’t re-use them and Amex will likely claw them back. This is the second time I’ve had to do this as I had used 2022 credits when I booked this trip for summer 2023 and later canceled.

I was also able to reschedule a couple of tours and airport pickups with no problems. On the whole, it didn’t take too long to unwind everything. Up next, I’ll reveal what we have booked and how it’s a bit different than the original plan.

If you have questions about this post, let me know in the comments or send me an email at emptynestermiles@gmail.com. If you are thinking about opening a new credit card, please use one of my links.