sorta reminds me when china eastern screwed up my flight from Hong Kong to Auckland via Shanghai. Yes it was a dumb choice of connection and airline, I know that now, but it was cheap
That reminded me of one of my more amusing travel stories.
A friend and his girlfriend were on a world trip when the wife and I were living in Shanghai. They wanted to fly from Tehran to Christchurch and there aren’t many choices for that kind of route, one of which was China Southern with a stopover in Ürümqi and a connection in Guangzhou. Having made reservations for the trip, they tried to pay for their tickets and found out that the only options available to them were mainland Chinese payment services. I don’t remember why exactly, but that’s how it was and of course, they didn’t have access to any of those services.
However, the options did include “ask a friend to pay for your ticket”. So they sent us a message asking if we could help.
Well… that is the sort of challenge I enjoy, so we had to find a way to get some €2000 into WeChat Pay and then pay the airline, and fast.
“You wouldn’t have that money in an account with bank D, by any chance?”
“Actually, yes!”
“Excellent, because the only way to send me that money instantly is into my account with bank D. Here’s the number.”
“OK, sent.”
“Alright, I’ll put my shoes on and walk to the Bank of China ATM while bank D is processing the transaction.”
Walk there, transfer the money from my checking account with bank D to my credit card, withdraw the cash, hope my CC doesn’t get blocked due to suspicious activity and deposit it into my wife’s BoC checking account. Needless to say it was late at night and I had to do this in several transactions because 16000 RMB is a lot more than you can withdraw from a Chinese ATM.
But it did work and once the money was in the Chinese account, I told them to send me a fresh “ask a friend to pay” link and was able to pay for the tickets. Phew!