Part 0: Heading Home and Booking Flights

I've been living in London on a 2 year Tier 5 Visa since January last year. When COVID started to hit at the end of February I had just returned to London after a trip to Japan, and was sent home to work remotely for a 2 week period (my first taste of quarantine), which extended into all of March as more and more of my office was split up, socially distanced and kept at home. Business dropped off dramatically as venues closed (I was working for a national wine and spirits distributor), and by April, I was placed on furlough - that is being paid 80% of my wage to stay at home while the industry and along with it the business and my job were mothballed.

May saw me return to work - alone in an office that normally housed 30 people.
While I found some form of routine in those next couple of months, London was no longer the city it was, and with the months starting to fly by, and plans to be back home for Christmas anyway, I started to think about coming home.
The question of "why didn't you come home earlier" gets asked alot, every Ausssie in London is sick of hearing it, and I'd like to cover it fully and separately in another post. Queensland imposing the $3000 quarantine fee early was the catalyst for getting serious about booking flights, and I was lucky I booked when I did at the end of June, beating the national deadline by about a couple of weeks (more on the process of applying for the exemption at a later date).

While work was picking up slowly, the company made the decision to implement lay-offs, and I put my hand up for a voluntary redundancy, setting my end date for the end of July. I decided to fly on the 1st of September - treating August as the closest thing I could get to a holiday before heading home.
I chose to fly with Singapore Airlines - prices were competitive when I booked, I'd flown with them before and there seemed to be far less issues with people being 'bumped' off of flights than there seemed to be with Qatar and Emirates. (another issue I might cover separately.)

My original itinerary had my leaving London at 10 o'clock Monday night, and a layover in Singapore of only 5 hours. It seemed too good to be true (turns out it was); I didn't have to get up early and would have plenty of time to pack up and head to the airport, perfect.
The only issue with this was that at the time of booking, this connection wasn't running. Back in June, Australia still had very few cases, and the expectation was for the daily caps to be relaxed, not to tighten up to the degree they did as Victoria went in to lockdown and the borders, both nationally and between states were shut down. And so the next couple of months consisted of compulsively checking the Singapore Air app to make sure my booking was still confirmed, which it was - right up until the 12th of August.

Roughly 2 weeks out from my flight and it was cancelled. I knew this might happen, spending too much time in Facebook groups about mandatory quarantine and flights to Australia had prepared me for this, but I had expected to be bumped to another flight, or for bookings on multiple flights to be consolidated down as they got closer. Instead it was just cancelled - 'Confirmed' simply changed to 'Previously Booked' on the app.
At this point, a little bit of panic did start to creep in. I was now unemployed, technically homeless and airfares were not getting any cheaper.

I got this news late on Tuesday night, and was just returning from a road trip holiday and to quote myself - "It's only a couple of hours, I'll call them in the morning." My first piece of advice for anyone who has read this far - call your airline as soon as you can if you get cancelled. If I had, I would have been able to rebook for the 6th, just a week later for roughly the same price (I was lucky enough to pick up my flight for around £650). Instead I waited those few hours until the morning, at which point the flights for the 6th had jumped about 50% to almost £1000. Luckily, flights for the 13th had stayed the same price, and a very quick, easy and painless call to Singapore Airlines got me rebooked to fly out just 2 weeks later than I had meant to.
My second piece of advice for anyone booking flights at the moment - check what flights airlines are currently running before booking. The flight I ended up catching - Leaving at 11.25 Sunday morning from London, long lay over in Singapore, and leaving at 23.10 to arrive at 7 o'clock Tuesday morning - that flight has been operating since the time I booked, and operated on the 31st of August (I just looked it up and the connecting flight - SQ279 - is the same as I ended up on anyway) and had I paid attention to this and booked to leave a day earlier I am pretty confident I would be home and out of quarantine by now.

Another month of so of compulsively checking the Singapore Air app kept me calm, until a late night call from a Singaporean number almost gave me a heart attack, just a few days out from when I was due to leave. My passport details fell off of their records when I had been rebooked, and it was just a courtesy call to check whether or not I held an Australian passport and knew the quarantine requirements, so keep that up to date if you want to avoid heart attacks I guess.

I set an alarm for Friday morning, exactly 48 hours before my flight time to check in as soon as I possibly could to not leave anything to chance, and that was it.

Reading other people's experiences trying to get home, I was incredibly lucky to get flights as cheap and painlessly as I did, as well as having a great support network on both sides of the world. Not everyone has that and while I am going to keep my opinions on Australia's flights caps for another time, they are wreaking havoc on thousands of Australians lives, families and mental health, that much is a fact.