For a few months now I’ve had a booking with an Asian airline to fly to Sydney just before Christmas, with a 4 hour layover in their Asian hub. They’ve now told me the outward leg has been cancelled due to maintenance work, and offered a transfer to a flight one day earlier, or a full refund.

Ideally we’d like to travel a day earlier and stay overnight in Asia. This will cost us another day of accomodation, and also another day of annual leave (though there’s not much they can do about that one). Are they obliged to offer us/reimburse us for accomodation if we transfer a day earlier? Anybody had a similar experience?

I am pretty sure that if they tell you this far our and offer you a refund, they are under no obligation to offer you anything else if you decide to take the flight.