I have encountered some howlers lately. Here are two examples of why you should inspect your flights booked on nwa.com FREQUENTLY, to keep on top of any possible itinerary changes.

First example -- We have award travel booked for June MSY-YUL and back. I received an email telling me of an itin change. The change re-scheduled us so that we were flying MSY-ATL, then had 8 hours to catch a connection way across town...make that way across country at DTW. That's right, no one automatically figured out that we needed a connection from ATL-DTW. Gold Elite agent fixed it by re-booking us MSY-MEM-DTW-YUL. Whew.


Today's example -- and I received NO nice email warning me of this one, I just noticed it while browsing my reservations on nwa.com. I had award travel booked MSY-IST and back. Well, they still had me booked to get to IST but no way to get back! Yikes! Apparently KLM cxl'd one or both of the aircraft traveling on April 1 from IST-AMS-ATL and it's no April Fools joke. The GOld Elite telephone agent discovered that I was re-booked to fly IST-AMS-ATL on April 2 instead. Fair enough, but no one told Delta, so my ATL-MSY flight was still going out on April 1. Oops again. I called back, and it's all fixed now, but I'm just saying. Some of these flights are going out VERY full. You don't want to be the last person to find out that your flight has been cxl'd and you may, or may not, have been properly re-booked by the computer. Actually, I think I *am* the last to know about my ATL-MSY flight, as the only seat left was a miserable window seat. Youch. I will be volunteering to be "bumped" on that flight, long day or not.

Keep an eye on your bookings, and if anything "funky" happens, give 'em a call. It's much easier to fix on their end than on yours, especially if DL and/or KLM flights are involved as well as NW flights. For whatever reason, flights are being constantly dropped, and people (or least this people) are not getting re-booked properly without talking to a real person.

I took a chance and booked one upcoming trip on delta.com. Will not be doing that again. It's too important in these times to be able to use the Gold/Plat elite line at nwa.com to fix these exciting changes.