I agree with the risk of managing schedule changes and cancellations when a booking has been made through an OTA. I maintain a policy of booking directly with airlines unless there is a huge price difference. However, sometimes the difference is too much.

Sharing my experience of handling a schedule change for a ticket purchased through Trip.com

• I bought a ticket for two connecting flights. Some months later, there was a schedule change which saw the flight date being delayed by one day (23 hours). The route doesn't operate daily and the new date didn't suit. It would work for me to fly 2 days earlier.
• Their self-service rebooking allowed rebooking +/-1 day of original date which meant I couldn't rebook it myself.
• First chat agent also said that rebooking was +/-1 day only. Kuwait Airways said their policy is +/- 7 days for a schedule change of this magnitude.
• Second and third agent confirmed it is +/-7 days and lodged the change for me. For some reason the change was cancelled (they later explained it was due to the airline's request to hold off in case of further schedule changes).
• Fourth agent didn't want to get into the permissible date change period but re-requested the change for me.
• At that time, I was frustrated enough to start a new chat to initiate a complaint. There was no separate complaint phone number or email so all I could do was initiate one through their regular chat. To my surprise, they were really sympathetic and escalated it quickly with an apology received within 24h with a USD15 credit to my account. They also confirmed the correct +/- 7 day delay.
• The change was finalised a few days later, delayed due to the airline's request to hold off because they were in the midst of further substantial schedule changes.

OVERALL:

Cons:

• Variable customer service experience for handling schedule change rebooking.

Pros:

• Very cheap prices not obtainable directly from the airline.
• Pretty good escalation and complaints process.
• Chatbot passes me to live chat quickly. No waiting for live chat in all instances, serviced once in English and other times in Japanese or Indonesian with live translation (impressive technology)
• The date change request was trackable with estimated completion time being updated a few times. Got the assurance that it was being managed rather than forgotten.

What do you reckon? Was my experience worse or better than via other OTAs?