Originally Posted by STS-134

Yes, AA screwed up, and they should give you compensation. However, this was also a planning failure on your part too. If there's an event that you absolutely do not want to miss, you shouldn't be planning to arrive the day before you think it's going to happen. Flights get canceled all the time, and if a flight gets canceled, how do you make sure you get there on time? You book a flight that arrives 3-4 days before you really need to be there for the event that you cannot miss, that's how. What would you have done if AA outright canceled your flight? You should plan to arrive at least 2 days before and ideally 3-4 days before the event (and for births, where the timing of the event is unpredictable, you should err toward more buffer time, not less).

When I watched the total eclipse in Chile, I did not plan to fly into Santiago on July 1 and then drive to Vicuņa the same day or early the next day to watch the eclipse on July 2. Instead, I flew in on June 29, spent 2 days there, then drove to Vicuņa on the third day. If my flight got canceled, this would give me 48 hours of buffer time to get to Santiago and I also had additional buffer time beyond that because I could have driven to Vicuņa on the same day I arrived if need be. My departing flight had similar buffer time, with a full night planned in Santiago before going to the airport, just in case there was bad traffic getting out of the eclipse zone. And guess what? A drive that usually takes 5-6 hours ended up taking over 10, and I didn't get to the hotel until after 10 pm. But it didn't affect my departure because I set things up so that if there were snags here and there, I didn't get completely screwed.

I constantly have to tell my parents to never book reservations for activities that are hard to get on the day of arrival or 1 day after planned arrival, because if there's a snag, they're going to miss the activity and won't be able to get a replacement reservation. Plan to do stuff that you wouldn't mind missing on the first and second days, because you just never know when you'll actually end up arriving late. Like births, there are no do overs for eclipses.