You’ve spent the last six months planning a vacation. You have a flight schedule. You have hotels reserved. You have cars rented. Everything is ready to go. But one thing you can’t always plan on is if some disaster occurs. It could be a tornado, hurricane, flooding, mudslides, or even wildfires. If catastrophes interrupt your travel plans, it’s essential to have a contingency in place.
Depending on the exact situation, you could look into things like financial relief options, flight schedules and rerouting, how to check in with family members and disaster areas, and what sort of long-term living adjustments are paired with the interruption in your itinerary.
Financial Relief Options
There may be a certain circumstance where you’re planning on traveling somewhere, then all of a sudden your hometown is struck by a disaster. This has happened to people in Florida and Texas recently. In the first thing that they have to do is figure out how to get their disaster mortgage relief payments. Before any traveling happens out of town, those details need to be taken care of. When your house is left behind, and you have to take up temporary residence somewhere else, for example, you still have to figure out how you’re going to rebuild your primary home.
Flight Schedules
And what about if you have planned on going on an exotic vacation to Mexico, but suddenly nasty weather it’s in the way? You have to figure out how to reschedule your flights, and that can be a real mess. Think of the people who had to reschedule flights out of areas in the US Northeast during and after blizzards for example. Prices, times, dates, and all sorts of information change on a dime, which is why you have to pay close attention to all of the information sources.
Checking in With Family
If a disaster happens somewhere that your family lives, and you plan on visiting them, you have a few new logistical options that can help you guys communicate. Facebook has a check-in feature that has allowed lots of people to connect safely after any dangerous event. The better that function gets, the more people can use it to communicate with concerned friends and family.
Long-Term Living Adjustments
Some long-term living adjustments occur after disasters in areas as well. For people who have traveled into or out of Puerto Rico in the last few months, there has never been a case where this is more prominent. Electricity is still a problem. Clean water is still a problem. So if there were any intentions to travel into or out of specific areas, they have been absolutely shelved until infrastructure can be replaced consistently.
