Check early and check often!

[vistapat]

Thanks to some posts by fellow CCers, I have been checking my Delta reservations for our flights to Barcelona for our Brilliance cruise in November. We made these reservations in April, and being the naive type I am, I probably would not have been checking except for warnings from fellow posters. When I checked again this evening, I found that all of our flights had been changed. Instead of San Diego to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Barcelona, we were now scheduled for San Diego to Atlanta to JFK to Barcelona. Bad enough in itself, except that the Atlanta to JFK leg took off three hours before the SAN to ATL leg landed :eek: :eek: . And, the return leg Barcelona to JFK had only a one-hour layover, which isn't nearly enough for an international flight. And keep in mind, this is JFK in November.

 

Thanks to the help of an extremely sweet and helpful Delta agent, I have it straightened out (for now!!), but the resulting flights aren't nearly as good as the ones we had. The moral is, keep a close eye on your reservation, and be prepared to straighten out any problems then and there. If I hadn't, and with the impossible flight to JFK, we would have missed our extra day in Barcelona, if not the whole cruise. You can bet I'll be on our reservation site daily from now on.

 

Patricia

[baabtx]

I think in today's airline environment, what you did was terribly important as many flights are now a moving target. With all the schedule changes, dropped cities and cutbacks who knows how your flight is scheduled now - it's important to get on the email reminders from the airlines if possible.

 

We're booked for a Canal cruise in November, flying into Ft. Lauderdale and out of Santiago, Chile. Fortunately the Chile flight has stayed static, but all of our domestic flight portions have changed. We're lucky that we're flying in the day prior as our outbound flight has changed 4 times since January and instead of arriving in Ft. Lauderdale at 4PM we're now arriving at 8:30 PM. So if you are flying the day of the cruise - this could cause major issues..

[cb at sea]

If they change your flight times by more than 90 mins., you can cancel without penalty.

This is an aggravation, when your flights are booked around an unchangable schedule! AA did this to us, and it totally freaked me out!

Some airlines will notify you if they have to change the flights--I don't know about Delta, but I'd ask if that service is available!

[cbtravel1]

We found the big itinerary changes last night with our Delta flights to Barcelona in January. We booked our flights back in January for our Med cruise and I have checked daily and had only found equipment changes until yesterday.

 

When we booked our flights in January we paid extra for a 1:05pm return flight out of Barcelona. Only to now find that they have cancelled that flight and have put us on a 10:35am return. I know that we can make it because last years flight was at 10:20am. My big concern is that they have made this big change who knows when they will change it again and to what time. If they do another schedule change, we may have to spend another night in Barcelona and fly back the next morning. I definately know that I will continue with daily checks.

[Blaidd-Drwg]

I can feel your pain and concern. I scheduled flights on American to Venice in November for the Splendour of the Seas Cruise. I made the flight arrangements at 329 days from the return, which was the first day I could make reservations. I made flights through London Gatwick and about 4 months later I checked the flights only to find that they now had me going to London Heathrow and transferring to Gatwick. Not wanting to clear customs just to make the hour drive across London to Gatwick, I found this unacceptable. The also had me on my return flight arriving back in England, 1 hour after the flight to JFK. I called and after finally getting transferred to a supervisory agent, I had flights which put me on Iberia through Madrid to Venice. Three weeks later Iberia changed their flights and once again, I had to go through the drill of figuring out new flights. Each flight change also meant changing my hotel reservations in Venice since the arrival date changed each time. Fortunately, with the lead time I'm working with I could react, but the advice to check early and often is very, very valid.

[BigDaddyCVO]

I booked with Delta (DTW to MIA) in March for a November FOS sailing and have had several changes. Most changes have been equipment, and as of right now we are back to using the same equipment that we had originally booked. There have been four significant time changes that required calls to the reservation center to make additional adjustments to better fit our schedule.

 

I anticipate the changes to continue. I check our reservations on-line almost daily. It's defiantly an inconvenience, but it's necessary if you have certain schedule needs.

[Lvdisnee]

When you check for schedule changes make sure to also check on your seats. UA didn't hasn't changed our flight times or equipment but they did switch seats around on us ~ even for Business class seats! Luckily we caught it right away and changed them back. I know it's not nearly as big a deal as a schedule change, but when you choose seats beacuse those really are the ones you want (for whatever reasons) it's nice to keep them!

[cbtravel1]

You are absolutely correct about also checking your seats. With our flight changes on one of the segments we were not even sitting together. Luckily I was able to grab two aisle seats left across from each other.

[cougfan]

This is so true. We had purchased our flight with Alaska frequent flyer miles back in December and just yesterday I checked our flight from Seattle to Barcelona. Our outbound flight to Barcelona on Air France was fine but our return, KLM from Barcelona-Amsterdam-Vancouver was for the day after our ship came in now, meaning an overnight in Barcelona. The only problem was they hadn't changed our Vancouver-Seattle flight, so it left on Nov. 1 but we would still be in Barcelona at that time. We got that changed, but the customer service rep at Alaska said to expect more changes.

 

Julie

[tomko2]

Some airlines have an email notification system you can sign up for, e.g. Air Canada. That way you get notified if anything changes.

Kathy

[brytyje3]

I booked with Delta (DTW to MIA) in March for a November FOS sailing and have had several changes. Most changes have been equipment, and as of right now we are back to using the same equipment that we had originally booked. There have been four significant time changes that required calls to the reservation center to make additional adjustments to better fit our schedule.

 

I anticipate the changes to continue. I check our reservations on-line almost daily. It's defiantly an inconvenience, but it's necessary if you have certain schedule needs.

 

I have a business trip to tampa in October w/ Delta and have found I need to check at least weekly. It's changed twice but as with you mostly equipment changes.

[ken_nyc]

For the last 3 years I have always check everything that pertain to ANY flight that I book. We usually book flights way in advance to get the best fares, which means you leave yourself open to many months of aggravation with an airline. Example: For our flight last year from JFK to Orlando, some aspect of the flight had changed NINE TIMES! Equipment, seats, flight times, what ever else they could change, changed. I was for ever checking 4-5 times a day, usually it was the middle of the month when there was a change made to the flight. I was on the phone with Delta quite a bit to get things straightened out. They changed my flight times FIVE TIMES, the return flight was getting earlier and earlier; which would of been OK except Royal Caribbean has a certain earliest time for passengers to have to use their transfers to the airport after their cruise. Well the flight time was changed earlier than that time and RCI would not take my request for the transfer. I had to call Delta and told them that I was a cruise line passenger and the flight had to be changed because I could not get my transfers from RCI. The time was only 25 minutes but because I was a cruise passenger they did not charge me a fee.

[twoputt.plusone]

We're doing the Med in 2 months and our flights have changed three times in the last week and a half. Someone on the cruise air board told me not to wait to contact our TA. I was planning to wait a couple of weeks to see if there were any more changes. If I had, I might have been in a lot of trouble as there are very few seats left on our new flights.

 

2P.P1

[krmlaw]

We just experieced the nice people at Delta as well, because of a problematic change. We are flying Albany to Ft Lauderdale. They changed our flights so we only had a 5 minutes layover in JFK ... no way in HECK we would get our bags onto the next plane, let alone catch it ourselves! The wonderful women on the phone from Delta changed our flights, to whatever I wanted! Even the more expensive flights I wanted in the first place! Now we have even BETTER flights than our original! :) Thanks Delta. I would have never checked our either if I didnt read it here. So thats CC!

[beachnative]

WOW, I just read this thread and decided to check our Delta reservations for April 2009. Just as you all have been saying, two legs of our flights had been changed. The first change was for the trip down (is now leaving 15 minutes earlier) which did not present a problem. On the return trip from San Juan to Norfolk the second leg (from Atlanta) had been changed and was scheduled to depart Atlanta 13 minutes BEFORE we were scheduled to arrive in Atlanta.

 

Thanks to this thread I have called and worked out the schedule and we are booked with reservations that work (well, at least for now).:)

 

Early in the conversation I asked if the first leg of our return flight could be changed to a flight leaving San Juan earlier so that we could make the departing Atlanta flight that THEY had changed. I got the dumbest answer: "We can't change just one leg of a flight, we have to change the entire flight." Duh, the whole problem was created when they changed one leg...if they could do it then why couldn't they do it now??? :confused: Go figure.

 

On our return flight we now have a four hour layover in Atlanta which is fine with us. At least if (when) they make another change we now (hopefully) have time built in to absorb the new schedule change.

 

To the OP: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. (I'll continue to check.)

[portseeker]

Experiencing similar problems. Bought tickets for San Juan in March for November cruise. In June, they changed flight and seat arrangements. I went online and selected same seats that we had on previous flight. American Airlines now has us listed as being ticketed in June instead of March. They refuse to put it back to March ticketing date. (Luggage issue involved in these dates). They advised that ticket agent in San Juan for return back will look through history of purchase and see original purchase date if checking additional luggage. I don't buy it. With all the passengers checking in for flights home, no ticket agent is going to discuss the difference of dates at that time. Still battling American over this issue.

 

Portseeker:(

[CharmedOne]

I will - once I book my flight - check up on my flights often for just such an occurrence. When we flew to Italy last September on Delta we didn't check and our flight landed in Paris from Detroit and our flight from Paris to Florence was moved up (which we noticed when we got off the plane) so that we had to get on the next plane in 45 minutes. HA! That was a joke. Luckily there were several others on that flight that were in the same dilemma. There was no way I'd fly into Paris again as a connector by the way. It was miserable (both flying in and then when we left to fly back home) and simply took FOREVER to get going.

 

I didn't book my flight early this time and now perhaps regret it pricewise. But, I guess I saved myself the hassle of checking constantly for a year on if my flight has changed. I just don't know what's better! UGH!

 

Also, if you book via online - how do you check to make sure you sit together?