Originally Posted by Boten

I have made many schedule changes in my airline career and I am pretty sure that at some point you would have been sent an email.

When changing schedules you tend to do many different changes in one go. You set up in the reservation system how passengers are going to move as a set of automated business rules with some rules a higher priority and with the lower priority being the less desirable moves. For example 1) Move to next flight 2) Move to even later flight 3) Move to earlier flight. 2 occurs if the next flight is full and 3 occurs if the next two flights are full but the number of people affected by 3 is much less but of course there is always someone.

When all that is done you could have affected 10s or 100s of thousands of people. The reason you don't always get an email as soon as your booking has changed is due to volume. Imagine if 100,000 people received an email about a flight change at the same time, how many of those 100,000 would immediately pick the phone up and called the contact centre? That would be disastrous (I have seen this happen). Therefore the emails tend to be batched in date order and sent out over time in order to manage the volume of communications towards the airline.

Hope this helps.