Originally Posted by
doc4science
I was flying from EWR to CMH on Saturday evening and my flight was cancelled. UA was able to reroute me out of LGA via ORD, but it got me thinking, how restrictive are IRROPS routings? For instance could I have asked to be put on UA2490 EWR-LAX, UA 2277 LAX-ORD, UA5560 ORD-CMH or something with even more stops (maybe try and hit all hubs)? I know it sounds stupid, but being under 21 it isn't easy to find hotels and I sleeping on a plane beats sleeping in the terminal imo.
Can they? Yes.
Will they? Probably not.
Airline reps will generally be willing to do things
that make sense to them upon request. For example, I got AA to reroute me from AUS-DFW-DTW to AUS-(AA)-LAX-(DL)-DTW once, because it was the only way to make the event I was planning to attend. Flying EWR-LAX-ORD-CMH isn't going to make any sense to an agent. You can ask, but you'll need a very good story -- and while your story about preferring to sleep on the plane makes some sense, I'm not sure it would be a winner. As for hitting all of the hubs -- that's going to be a non-starter, if for no other reason than they'll want to save the extra legs for some other passenger who needs them.