Originally Posted by
CoolTourist
To clarify a few points...
My original reservation was booked through OTA flying with Air Canada. All flights on the original itinerary were AC flights. I discovered that AC moved our flight by pure chance when I logged in to my itinerary on their website to verify my frequent flyer number. That's when I discovered that Toronto to Istanbul flight was moved 4 hours back. Our connecting flight from Chicago was not changed, however. So what it meant was that if we were boarding our flight in Chicago to fly to Toronto the flight from Toronto to Istanbul would already be in the air on its way to Turkey.
No one from Air Canada informed me of this change. Moreover, when I called AC they told me that it's OTA's job to inform passengers of scheduling changes and not theirs...
Accepting their offer for 11 AM departure creates the following issues:
1. We will miss connecting with our German family member.
2. Arriving to the airport at 11AM as oppose to 4PM means that I have to completely miss work that day i.e. take an extra vacation day because of the goofiness they created.
I still think that reseating us on a AC's partner carrier is not an unreasonable request.
Arriving to Istanbul at 9:25 in the morning, according to a new itinerary, is ok except that we can't check in to hotel that early and our German passenger will pay for her own cab, instead of riding with us.
On the day of departure our was also moved 4 hours early, so once again we can't ride together.
Two extra rides between city center and Istanbul airport will run close to €60 of unplanned expense.
And changing our family member's itinerary to match ours would cost even more...
Today I got a new response from AC customer relations saying that their department actually does not deal with pre departure flight issues, their purview is only past travel issues. Furthermore they are claiming to even not having access to the reservation system on their end. And now they are referring me back to Reservations where I was told to contact customer relations.
So now they have completed this circle.
I'm guessing that a schedule adjustment has taken place (and agreed upon) by both AC & TK-Turkish Airlines. AC flights are moving from 3/week > Daily & TK is moving to 6/week - both airlines have full codeshare agreements on the other, and presumably the sked change is to maximize connectivity options to/from IST. When you say "reseating on AC's partner carrier", presumably you're talking about TK which has a late departure from YYZ and a late afternoon arrival at IST on which AC bears a code-shared flight number. Have you checked into this option?