Dolphin and Your Flight: What to Check Today, What to Wait On, and What to Rebook Now
UPDATE — 11 August 2026. How this ended, for the record. Shanghai Hongqiao and Pudong cancelled roughly 1,300 flights around the 9 August landfall — about 943 on the day itself, close to a 40 per cent capacity cut — and were still cancelling on the Monday, after Dolphin had weakened to a tropical storm. That is the pattern this article described: the cancellations outlast the storm, because the aircraft are in the wrong cities.
If you are flying to or from Japan this week, the live storm is now Chan-hom, not Dolphin.
If you are booked into or through Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan or eastern China in the next ten days, this is the decision you are actually facing.
Not whether the typhoon is dangerous. Whether to touch your booking, and when.
Here is the situation as it stands. Typhoon Dolphin is moving west at around 20 km/h and is forecast to make landfall on Okinawa on 7 August, around mid-afternoon local time, with winds near 185 km/h at that point. Waves around Okinawa are forecast to reach nine metres, and around six metres in the Amami Islands.
After that it moves into the East China Sea, and current guidance points at a second landfall in central Zhejiang province, China, roughly four days out.
The wind field is wide — gale-force winds are expected across a swath of the East China Sea on the order of a thousand kilometres. That matters more than the landfall point for anyone with a booking.
Most people reading this are not in Okinawa. You are somewhere else with a ticket, trying to work out whether to act. So this article is about the booking, not the storm.
What to check today
Four things, in this order. It takes about fifteen minutes.
First, your actual routing rather than your destination. A flight to Bangkok that connects in Taipei is exposed. A flight to Seoul that routes nowhere near the storm may still be affected if the aircraft is coming from a disrupted airport. Look at the flight numbers, not the city on the ticket.
Second, whether your airline has published a travel advisory. Every major carrier has a page for this, usually called travel alerts, travel advisories or weather waivers. Search the airline name plus "travel alert" and read the actual page rather than a news summary.
What you are looking for is three specific things: which airports are covered, which travel dates are covered, and what you are allowed to do — change without fee, refund, or both.
Third, whether your dates fall inside that window. Waivers are published with hard date ranges. If your flight is one day outside the window, the waiver does not apply to you today, and it may or may not be extended later.
Fourth, who actually holds your booking. If you booked through an agency or a third-party site, the airline will usually tell you to go back to them, and the agency will be slower. Knowing this now is better than discovering it while queuing on a phone line.
Write down what you find. When the situation changes on Friday, you want to be comparing against a note, not a memory.
What to wait on
This is the part most people get wrong, in both directions.
If your flight is more than about five days out, do nothing yet. The forecast beyond four days is genuinely uncertain, waiver windows get extended as the picture clarifies, and cancelling early usually means giving up more than you gain.
The specific mistake is cancelling for a refund before a waiver is published. Once you cancel voluntarily, you are bound by your original fare rules. If a waiver appears two days later, you no longer qualify for it, because you no longer have a booking.
Wait for the waiver. It costs nothing to wait and it is the difference between a fee-free change and a forfeited ticket.
The second thing to wait on is the model spread. Guidance for the China landfall is still resolving. If your booking is into Shanghai or Zhejiang later next week, that picture will look different in forty-eight hours than it does now.
There is a third thing worth not doing: rebooking onto a flight one day later. Typhoon disruption does not clear in twenty-four hours. If you move, move by several days or to a different routing entirely, otherwise you are rebooking into the backlog.
And do not rely on a news article, including this one, as your trigger. The airline's own advisory page is the only thing that binds them.
What to rebook now
There is a narrow set of cases where acting today is correct.
If you are flying into or out of Okinawa, Amami or the Ryukyus on 6, 7 or 8 August, treat that flight as gone. The airports will be closed or effectively closed around landfall, and the airlines will cancel. Move now while there are still seats on the days either side.
If you are connecting through Taipei, Naha or an eastern China hub on those dates, look for a routing that avoids them entirely. A connection through Seoul, Manila or Hong Kong may cost more today and will cost less than a missed connection.
If you are travelling with people who cannot absorb a bad day — small children, elderly parents, anyone with medical needs, anyone on a tight onward connection — act earlier than the forecast strictly requires. The cost of moving is known. The cost of being stuck is not.
If you have a cruise, a tour with a fixed start date, or a non-refundable onward booking, the calculation changes because the loss is larger than the flight. Move the flight to protect the expensive thing.
And if a waiver has already been published covering your dates, use it today rather than on Friday. Waivers give you access to seats, and the seats are finite. The people who call on the first day get the good options.
The general rule underneath all of this: act early on things that are cheap to change, wait on things that are expensive to change, and never cancel outside a waiver.
Where to check this yourself
Do not take a forecast from a blog, including this one. Use the agency responsible for the area, and your airline for the booking.
Japan Meteorological Agency: https://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/
Korea Meteorological Administration: https://www.kma.go.kr/eng/weather/typoon/typhoon_05.jsp
Joint Typhoon Warning Center: https://www.metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/jtwc.html
Hong Kong Observatory: https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/index.html
China National Meteorological Center: http://www.nmc.cn/publish/typhoon/typhoon.html
JMA is the official source for Japanese airports. JTWC publishes the model spread, which is what tells you how confident the day-four forecast actually is.
The short version
Check your routing, your airline's advisory page, your dates against the waiver window, and who holds your booking. Fifteen minutes.
If you fly through the Ryukyus on the 6th, 7th or 8th, move now.
If you fly later than about five days out, wait. The forecast will improve and the waiver may extend.
Never cancel voluntarily before a waiver exists. That single mistake costs more money than everything else on this page combined.
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