I apologize if the following has already been talked about, the search function seems to be disabled.

I was on flight 116 from EWR-MSY on Feb 18th (supposed to be a 3:35 p.m. departure). First Class and elites had boarded (except me) and about 20% of coach had also boarded. I went to the counter and noticed that the flight said Las Vegas, where it had said New Orleans just 2 minutes earlier, just before I went to grab a magazine. The gate agent called and indeed confirmed that there had been a gate change. She promptly stopped boarding and pulled passengers off the plane. This plane, although "oversold", at the last minute had been given to the Las Vegas flight (don't remember the flight number).

I went to the President's Club and the ladies there were shocked that the plane would be switched like that. About 30 minutes later 2 guys came into the lounge. They were on the Vegas flight (the plane originally scheduled for New Orleans). I overheard one of them bragging to the lady at the desk that his friend is 'very important', and because of that got the planes swapped. Evidently their original plane had problems. Anyway, even after they "took" our plane, the ATC made them stay at the gate for 2 hours since they didn't have a take off slot and couldn't use ours because they took to long de-planing my outbound flight and then trying to board our plane with the Vegas passengers. However their flight still left about 90 minutes before our new flight.

When we finally boarded at 7:05 p.m., we were all given a Customer Care Kit with 1 co currency, 1 discount coupon, and 1 prepaid phone card, but we were given no explaination of the reason for the switch.

I have 2 questions:
1. Is it possible that somebody could really get the planes "switched" like those people were saying?
2. Since we arrived more than 3 hours after the scheduled arrival, am I owed any compensation by Continental (and if so, how do I go about getting it?) I don't think that they can say that flight 116 to New Orelans was a weather delay.

Thanks