Originally Posted by
alanh
Normally, you're automatically rebooked when an airline adjusts its schedule. Airlines do this several times a year, but not all flights are affected, you were just "lucky" enough to be on one of them.
However, you should periodically check your reservation to see if anything has changed. A common occurrence is for your seat reservations to be switched, leaving your party scattered around the plane.
It's also possible that the change will have a new flight time that's unworkable, or a connection that's impossible. I had a change on Delta that left 15 minutes for an international to domestic connection. In these cases, you have to call and get it fixed.
At the very minimum, you should check a day or two before for the exact flight times in case they've changed. (Back in the Elder Days before the internet, we had to call the airline the day before to confirm the flight times.)
It would be nice if the airline would call or e-mail you, and sometimes they do, but you can't count on it.
I never experencied this before, but this year I first look to my reservation to see that our seats were changed. My wife and oldest kids somewhere in the front, I was in the middle and our youngest (4yr) was in the back. So I called immediately to change this back. Later I rechecked to find out that they changed the plane, what caused the problems (MD11->747-400).
I decided to call again the next day for a seatchange, because the seatconfiguration is somewhat different - to find out that the flight was cancelled (!). They were rebooking us from a direct flight to a flight with one stop, and because I called at the time they were rebooking I could arrange the exact seats I wanted - I was the first in line
The change was for tuesday/thursday flights only.
Then after a few days they changed the time - no big problem. But they did contact me about this change.
Later I was contacted that the exact same flight three months later (when my sister with her family is on that flight) was cancelled and changed exactly the way our flight was changed. They changed the schedule again, now the saturday-flight was involved - and the thursday flight was changed back to the direct flight.
So in many years never had a problem with this (okay, most flights were booked short before departure), now several in a short time.