I just flew home to New York City from South Africa after cutting my vacation short because of the explosion of the coronavirus pandemic, and it was a completely surreal experience
Almost a year ago, my wife and I began planning a huge vacation to South Africa for this March.
Within just a few days of leaving, the situation had changed drastically, with countries closing their borders, flights across the globe being canceled, and the coronavirus being declared a full-blown pandemic. Combined with more recent flight cancellations and travel bans, after speaking with our travel agent, we decided that the situation was too dicey and we needed to get home before there was any further lockdown or prohibition on border crossings, or before flights became unavailable.
It turns out that we ended up buying business class tickets by mistake. Thanks to a bizarre quirk with the algorithms that price tickets, as everyone scrambled to race home and flights were filling up, the business class tickets were cheaper than every viable coach alternative. Google Flights pulled the fare even though I had the filter set to economy only.
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