Originally Posted by Snigle

I hoping someone can help give me some advice. My wife and I are traveling to Punta Arenas in a week and a half leaving from Chicago.

I had booked the flight with my AA miles to Santiago (SCL) and on a separate LATAM ticket from SCL to Punta Arena (PUQ). My total flights looked like this:

* ORD (6AM Dec 29th) -> DFW
* SCL (7:40PM Dec 29th) -> SCL (7AM Dec 30th)
* SCL (8AM Dec 31st) -> PUQ

I gave us 12+ hours in DFW to account for any winter weather delays out of ORD, and a full day in SCL to account for any delays getting out of DFW. However, American has since changed our itinerary and their schedule so it is now:

* ORD (3PM Dec 29th) -> DFW (5:40PM)
* SCL (7:40PM Dec 29th) -> SCL (7AM Dec 30th)

So now if we are delayed out of ORD for more than 2 hours we will miss our SCL flight. The SCL flight now runs once a day which means we would miss our SCL->PUQ flight and since they are on separate tickets I would be out of luck and the rest of our LATAM legs would be canceled and would strand us in Santiago.

I called American Airlines and explained my situation and asked that they either change my flight back to my original itinerary (I still don't know why they changed our 6AM flight to 3PM..) or get us out of Chicago the day before (Dec 28th). They said there was nothing they could do since I'm an award ticket and that I should call back closer to my departure if the weather looks unfavorable.

Now my question for you all is if it looks like there will be snow or ice for my departure day (Dec 29th) when should I call American Airlines and try again to get them to adjust our outbound flight? If there is a weather advisory do they typically let you depart before the storm hits or is it typically only to reschedule for after the inclement weather passes? Any other suggestions on how to handle a possible delay or bad weather next week would be great. Thanks!