A Disney Parks Around the World Journey: Day 4 – Man Plans, God Laughs Part II

“It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” – Rocky

So we approached the Air France desk and I handed over our passports. They then proceeded to ask me if I had a Chinese visa. We did not as for our trip it was not at all necessary. While you need a visa for China if you are touring all around China in non visa free approved areas, if you are entering in from one country and then flying out to another country and stay within approved regions or cities you do NOT need a visa if flying out within 144 hours. This is called the 144 hour transit without visa rule.

Ironically on 12/17, two days prior to starting this trip it was actually increased from 144 hours to 240 hours of allowable transit time and they added the ability to move within allowed regions and cities. So it just changed to the 240 transit without visa rule. They literally just relaxed the rule even more! You can read about this straight from the Chinese embassy or on the US.gov Travel site, via forums, or on a Disney blogs as a just a few references. I had researched extensively about the rule, and through my reading the itinerary of Miami-Paris-Shanghai-Hong Kong was a completely legitimate transit. While Hong Kong is part of China, it is an SAR, Special administrative region, and counts for the transit rule. I fulfilled all the requirements to the letter.

Apparently Air France was not informed of any iteration of the 240 hour transit without visa rule also known as “TWOV” and because of this ignorance upon check in they were refusing to issue a boarding pass despite their OWN website stating that we do not need a visa if transiting.

As you can see above there is a clear discordance on their own website. It says “You are not cleared to board this flight.” But the area I highlighted in yellow states “Transit visa is not required …” if certain conditions were met. We met those conditions perfectly.

I continue to persistently argue with the staff that my itinerary is legitimate and I can show them a number of government sources that clearly state it is legitimate. The staff then rehuddle and bring in the manager. They talk in French, but thankfully I know enough French to where I can pick out some occasional words, and it does not sound promising. They then call a someone in France who had the final say on this situation. As they discussed our situation over the phone, Lucy noticed I was shaking due to my apprehension.

I was so nervous as sooo much of our trip was riding on us making this flight as our plans were meticulously timed to make all 12 parks and have some rest in doing so. I’ve been traumatized at airline counters before, the most severe when we were nearly denied leaving Johannesburg after Kendall was run over by a car. I have never written about that, but the day we made it out of Johannesburg was right out of a thriller movie, and honestly, the second most traumatic day of my life, second only to Kendall being run over by a car.

I had spent the last 5 years mulling over how Covid shot down our Disney trip down in 2020. I have now spent the last year planning every detail to try and make this upcoming trip as smooth and feasible as possible. Without the layover in Paris we’d miss Disneyland Paris so bypassing Paris to get to Shanghai was NOT an option. We really needed this particular itinerary to make this trip work and there was no way to replace it.

My heart was beating fast but my mind was racing even faster at this point. If we don’t make this flight what are we going to do?? How can we possibly fix this problem? They then get off the phone with the person in France and come back to the desk. I hope and pray for good news.

Denied! Our hearts were broken. I just about died inside as while I am mentally prepped for a lot of travel situations, denial of boarding was just not on my radar. I had read about occasionally some smaller airports being unfamiliar with the 240 hour TWOV rule, but a large international airport like MIA on a carrier like Air France… I just did not think that was in the cards. Lucy was in tears. I then proceed to beg and plead with the duty manager explaining my case. As he heard more and more of our story and how we don’t live in Miami and how we were doing all the Disney Parks in one trip, and that this trip was 5 years in the making he felt awful and at one point starting tearing up at the desk.

There were so many problems being denied this flight. One is that unlike overbooking, or weather caused issues, they are blaming me and as such it is on me to fix the issue. All they can do, and this was as a courtesy as a business class passenger the manager said, was rebook us on the 24th which is 48 hours later as the 23rd was fully booked and oversold. Because there was not any other issue with the flight like weather or mechanical issues there was no way they could use an interline agreement to get me on another carrier anywhere. We were 100 percent committed to Air France. We had a contract with them to get from MIA to PVG and that was it.

The other issue is that this was a Business Class ticket booked via miles. If I cancelled all I would get were my Air France miles back and the taxes and fees. I wouldn’t be able to get cash back to use for other airlines and all the reasonably priced award redemptions to Paris were long gone. They even refused letting us just take the plane to Paris and not continue to Shanghai as the flights are married in the computer and cannot be separated and as such they refused to let us board so we could at least get to Paris.

Even IF we took the later flight on the 24th that only buys us time to get a visa, as that is all Air France in Miami would accept. So we’d have 48 hours to get a visa. You can only get a visa in that time frame at an embassy and the closest Chinese embassy is Washington DC. In theory we could fly to DC to see if they can get us a visa, and fly back in time but that is crazy hectic and in no way guaranteed especially being the holiday season. I asked if they could just get us to anywhere is Southwest Asia, and that was a no as well. They were contractually obligated to get us to Shanghai and that is all they could do. We were basically stuck trying to find a visa if we planned on using AF out of MIA.

Normally, a couple day delay is a big deal no matter what vacation, for this extremely fast paced itinerary it was EVERYTHING, as every minute mattered. This was a literal make or break moment for our vacation, and flying Air France with a 10 hour layover so we could hit the two Disney Parks in Paris was integral to that plan. If they were willing to fly us to Hong Kong we could still make our original plan work as the HKG flight had the same length of layover, and we could then fly to Shanghai from HKG after visiting the park there. When the guy in France said “no” we were black listed in the system and he said we’d get flagged if we flew that flight.

The on duty manager had to deal with several other passengers during this time and would come back and check on us as we continued to discuss our next move. It was getting late and I pleaded our case one last time to get us approved and the flag removed, and he said he could try to call one more person. He got on his phone and walked away talking for a while, and I was thinking maybe this was it. Maybe this was our Christmas miracle. I had seen it happen in the Christmas movies so many times where the main character has someone be it Santa , random stranger, or a power from above come through for them in the final hour. I was thinking that maybe for once we would get that happy ending, that Christmas miracle and Ariel, the duty manager, was going to be our angel coming back telling me he performed a miracle. I then see him hang up the phone and walk back to us. My heart is beating out of my chest, and I hope and pray he says he got us approved. He then tells us that there is just nothing more he can do. I lay my head on the counter totally defeated and a part of me dies at this point.

So much was riding on going this flight and making it to Paris and then onward to Shanghai. We eventually accepted reality that our only option was to move our flight to the 24th to buy us some time to think about our next move. We felt completely and utterly deflated. My biggest fear was a major delay, causing us to not have enough time in Paris to visit Disneyland Paris, or delay getting back to the airport in Paris and missing our plane to Hong Kong. I never thought the airline itself would be the direct cause of the destruction of our vacation.

At this point we picked ourselves off the mat and I booked the Fairfield Inn by the airport.

We called the shuttle and we left completely and totally dejected. To add further salt to the wound my flight notification app just informed me our flight just took off and was on time. I immediately deleted the flight and subsequent flight to Shanghai from my notifications to prevent any further taunting by my phone.

This is definitely the lowest we’ve felt in a while. I was thinking on the shuttle to the hotel about whether I’d continue the blog at this point I was so down, and how this would not exactly make for much of a “Disney Around the World Trip” if we stopped after one city. We’d just rename it to a “Disney World Trip” I guess. Four out of twelve parks isn’t bad right?? Thirty three percent is abject failure except in the most extreme grading curves, so no matter how you sliced it this was now a failure.

The shuttle dropped us off at about 11:00PM and we order some comfort food as we hadn’t eaten since Orlando. For Kendall and Lucy that means some Papa John’s pizza. I wasn’t very hungry as all the stress and nervousness killed my appetite, but now that I was slowly calming down I could feel my appetite returning.

In the meantime, I breakout the laptop and immediately start doing flight searches, for both award flights and cash flights.

The Tokyo part of our vacation was set in stone. The logistics of planning a Tokyo Disney Vacation is monstrous and if you read the planning portion of this vacation on the blog you will understand why.

I was absolutely desperate so I even crowdsourced some ideas as to what to do from the 10x Travel group I am a part of on Facebook. The issue is there were so many limitations. For one, we had to get from Miami to Paris. This could be on any airline. Number two, we needed to get from Paris to Shanghai or Hong Kong. If we went to Shanghai it couldn’t be on Air France as I had lost faith in them to get me to China. We also needed to do the long hauls in business class.

I know the business class requirement likely sounds snobbish to a lot of people, but due to the break neck pace of this vacation, a lot of our rest, sleep, and relaxation was totally predicated on getting it on a plane. One long haul flight is enough to wreck a body, and doing it back to back while also doing some Disney Parks is just brutal. We have done many long hauls in economy, but never when we are traveling around the world to ALL the Disney parks in a little over two weeks. Buying business class flights in cash with such short notice would be insanely cost prohibitive easily dwarfing the total cost of the vacation.

Our budget for this trip is obviously very high, but we kept the costs down by using our points and miles for the flights. As I started looking at business class flights that got us to Paris and then onward to Shanghai or Hong Kong, we were looking in the 30,000+ USD range minimum and those were often not even direct flights with very long layovers. I was really not looking to spend an extra 30,000 USD right now, so that was a no go.

Unfortunately, AIRLINE STUPIDITY is not covered under travel insurance policies so it was now on me to rebuild an itinerary that eventually ends us up in Tokyo on December 31st. I spent till 4:30AM looking for flight options via points and miles, racing against the clock to find something that would work. After over 5 hours of searching innumerable airlines and redemption programs and airport combinations I FINALLY found something that MAY work without bankrupting us and then went to sleep so I could discuss the options with Kendall and Lucy in the morning.

Day 4, December 22nd, 2024 Step Count – 9,876 Steps

Total Step Count – 73,847

Continue to the next day here.

Read about the previous day here.