If one doesn't constantly monitor flights, the unintended consequences, and surprises can be immense, and often, too late to do anything about. The "company line" is always "there may be more schedule changes so we don't do anything until closer to departure date."

This has been a recurring theme on FT for some time. Today I was hit with a relative doozy, and had an agent that gave me the company line.

My itinerary (partner award, with a connecting AS segment) was once again, not viewable online. Nevertheless, I have been checking things on virtuallythere, which shows the partner's PNRs. I could see there were minor time changes on a few of the partner flights. I called AS so that the PNR could be cleaned up and so I could view it again @AS. The agent told me that they only do these closer to departure. I asked her to clean up the PNR so I could view it again. (It is not viewable again, by the way). She did say "there's a flight # change."

What she did not tell me is that my QX flight of 910A is now a QX flight of 555P. I only noticed this when I received the confirmation email.

Please, dear Alaska, send us the changes right away, not at our prompting, so we can make alternative arrangements, accept the changes, etc. And please let us view our itineraries on the website, no matter how minor or major the schedule change may be, so we are educated when we call, and don't have to search for alternative sources to try and figure things out in advance. In my case, I still have ample time to search for award space with an alternative routing. But for "Joe Blow" non-expert, who might find out a couple of months from now that "oh by the way, you are now spending a full day @ LAX" or "you are missing a day of your vacation" or "it is too late for you to ask for the day off work because your flight time has been changed by 12 hours," this is just wrong, wrong, wrong.