For some time during my travel there hasn’t been any major problems. But of course now when we were returning to Finland, we encountered a minor delay, which can happen any day but turned to change everything. It started in the first airport in Qingdao with minor 2.5 hour delay. That isn’t that huge delay, you can easily spend that time in the lounge and enjoying some refreshments. But when we arrived to Beijing then all the plans just changed, we missed our connection to Stockholm and we faced a situation where we needed to redesign the whole trip.

And it didn’t actually go so easily, for many reasons (and most of those still unknown to me) there were huge problems to book new flights with Star Alliance (mainly SAS) and especially the connections to Finland. Tampere has never been an easy destination for people outside of Finland but these problems were much more than just recognizing the airport code. In the end I just suggested re-routing us through Hong Kong and London. In the end, the long-haul flight from Hong Kong to London was surprisingly with Cathay Pacific, which was a nice surprise that they approved that. It brought at least some certainty to the long-haul and also certain level of service guaranteed.

After all, we arrived to Finland, just after traveling about 39.5 hours totally including all the time spent in the different airports. Traveling can be such a fun thing.