A couple months back, I booked tickes DEN-LAX and SNA-DEN on the return. These are positioning flights to get me and my family to and from LA for an international trip on another carrier (separate tickets). Our original plan was that we would spend three days at a beach resort in Orange County on our return, but our international carrier changed our schedule so that we would get back to LA the night before our return flight from SNA.

I called United reservations last week to see if there would be any way to change our return to fly out of LAX instead of SNA given our circumstances. They very graciously waived the change fees, but had to price out the itinerary as a brand-new ticket. As a result, I had to give up our afternoon outbound flight to LAX in exchange for the last flight of the day because the outbound flight we had was priced almost 4 times as much as what we had originally paid.

So the good news is that I was able to change from SNA to LAX without change fees and only $95 add per ticket. The bad news is that I'm now stuck with a flight to LAX that I really didn't want.

Is there anything I could have done differently or did I do about the best I could under the circumstances?