I had not previously found Flight Notifications very useful. They can only be sent as a voice message to a US phone number, and when sent as “Text Messages” they are not the ubiquitous SMS text messages that we use in Europe, but only emails.

What I had not realized is that most (though not all) cell phones have an email address: <cell phone number>@<service provider>. The email is received by the phone as an SMS text message. So this solves the problem if your service provider supports email addresses. For more information see http://www.sms411.net/, http://www.notepage.net/smtp.htm and http://www.filesaveas.com/sms.html#links.

One detail: when setting up a Flight Notification on aa.com, I am not sure what difference (if any) it makes whether you select the Notification to go to “Email” or “Cell phone”?

I also noticed what appears to be a bug: when creating a Notification for an overnight flight, aa.com correctly defaulted to “Notify me of the Departure from” but inserted the arrival date rather than deparure date in “Departure/Arrival Date:”!

I guess that it would also make sense to use the cell phone email address for upgrade notifications, as these often come at the last minute!