Originally Posted by
Fanjet
I figured Delta "jumped the gun" for two reasons. 1) They just announced the elimination of LAX-NRT starting in the winter season. So people flying to Tokyo will only have one nonstop choice from LAX to book going forward; and it's better for DL to start mirroring what would be close to the eventual LAX-HND flight times. And 2) It's a lot easier to have people book under a tentative schedule that's going to be a lot closer to the eventual flight times than it is to continue with bookings under the old schedule, which would then be a schedule change of several hours versus one or two. Just look at your schedule change. It was either moving your departure up seven hours or back seventeen. And you'll still probably have another schedule change. Although much closer to your currently new flight times.
On the plus side, any changes this far out give me that much more time to play with options (not that I'd expect to have severely limited options for February by June/July). But at least this change means I can start working options now. The way I see it my current options are
1) Keep what I have (well, with fixing the current negative connection in LAX since I now land in LAX on Saturday morning but still have the original connecting flight on AS which departs on Friday night)
2) Ask to switch to the NRT-SEA nonstop
3) Ask for a crazy routing such as NRT-DTW-SEA to get the 747 on NRT-DTW.
To be honest, of the three I'm not sure which options I'd prefer. All have pros (and the only "con" IMO for option 2 and 3 is having to go out of NRT versus HND).