cova

I have a dozen trips booked for early next year and all have recently experience major schedule changes, aircraft swaps, and flight cancellations. I am having to spend hours on the phone to get this fixed.

1. Schedule changes - major schedule changes with next flight connection not working. I have flights arriving after the departure of some flights, and even return flights on a RT departing before arrival.

2. Cancellation - early morning flights (out of DCA) are being cancelled.

3. Aircraft swaps - at least out of DCA most 738s are being swapped out for 320s an 321s (USAir Versions). Equivalent seats are not being preserved. Having MCE or Exit rows - just being reassigned regular seats farther back.

4. Not being rebooked on the most logical replacement flight. Example - had an 11:52am DCA-DFW (to international connect), but with an aircraft change and flight number I was rebooked on a 12:45pm, when there was a 11:55am flight. No change in the departure of the international flight but an aircraft type change. I understand AA usually books you on the next flight later in time (even if a minute earlie)r but in this case the logical flight would be 3 minutes later.

Why is AA making so many major flight changes?

Also things like auto upgrade request for EXP is being cancelled, and has to be manually redone. Say you have a companion on same PNR, normally you only see the upgrade request box for the companion, but agent told me they also cancelled my auto upgrade request as well which needed to be manually redone.

ty97

Schedule changes for flights more than 2-3 months out are not uncommon (on AA or any airline). AA generally uses a placeholder schedule for more than ~3 months out, and it looks like there were a lot of updates for January (and perhaps early February) this weekend as AA updates and locks that portion of the schedule.

AA's rebooking tends to be automatic, and the automated logic is not great. I got a schedule change this weekend where a flight I was booked on had a flight number change, though the departure time remained the same. Because of that 'schedule change', I was auto-rebooked onto a flight two hours earlier that I did not want and had to call to fix this.

It can be annoying, but we need to monitor every Sunday/Monday and call to fix things that don't work for us. The good news is that these changes can often work out in your benefit, as you can get a free flight change to your preferred flights.

JDiver

First of all, there are seasonal changes. (The Airlines actually have a conference that deals with these.) Then there are passenger load changes, fleet changes (East 757s eventually going west, A330-300s just going, more 787s and 737s including the MAX 8, retirement of more MD-80s, etc.

Unfortunately, AA IT does an abominable job with these issues when they affect passengers. So many of us fly defensively, review our flights often enough to proactively make the best we can out of our changes.

jcatman

My telephone call for the "free flight change" came with the warning that there was only one seat remaining on the preferred flight in the fare bucket that I originally purchased. When I hear that, it makes me want to "test" AA and see what they say when that fare bucket is gone and I have yet to accept the schedule change.

I understand that flight times and equipment have to be adjusted. But if AA is relying on the customer to discover the schedule change without the courtesy of an email or other notification, I expect the airline to be accommodating with regard to "fare bucket" availability.

AANYC1981

Enjoy those LUS planes

Aero137

There was an article on WSJ the other day talking about on-time performance. One thing they mentioned specifically was that AA was going to have all long-haul international flights out of ORD next summer be on 787s. This is to make it easier to swap aircraft. I assume they will be doing similar reshuffling at other hubs.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-secret...ght-1507736231 [may require subscription]

rossmacd

I posted this in the main schedule changes thread, but it seems appropriate to bring this up here:

As I am asking for April, and schedule changes are just going through for Q1, I am hoping that changes for April will still be forthcoming. What are the collective thoughts?

ty97

Based on this week's OAG thread at a.net (I read that thread every week) it looks like the bulk of changes this weekend were for January. Based on what I've seen from AA, when they do these mass updates to 'lock' the schedule (about 3 months out), it's not actual calendar January that gets update (i.e. not Jan 1-31) but rather the schedule was probably already locked through, say, January 6 so this update may have been for January 7 - February 5 or something like that. But for simplicity, call it a January update.

AA seems pretty consistent in locking the schedule for a roughly a new one-month period about once a month. So I expect a big April schedule change will still come in a few months. Whether it will impact your flights, can't say. But there will definitely be a lot of April updates, probably sometime in December or January.

rossmacd

Fantastic, thank you. Fingers crossed

ronbo83

All 3 of my Jan and Feb flights were changed. Had to call in to confirm each change and had to manually request companion upgrade as well. I don’t mind the slight schedule changes or aircraft but it seems like AA could do more on the IT front here to make this change simpler. Perhaps preferred seats on each aircraft type, an acceptance button of the change online, and auto request of upgrades after change. Took me 20 minutes to get everything back to normal.

JDiver

AA was first, irrc, with information technology for airline bookings by developing the Magnetronic Reservisor system in 1952. After that came SABRE (Semi-automated Business Research Environment) in the early 1960s, patterned on the IBM-USAF SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system (though TCA's ReserVec was really the earliest airline computer-based booking system). That means Sabre is a true Kluge project, layers upon layers of code. Changes seen as easy may become complex and difficult: iirc the project to list SWU in one's account was expected to be easy and took over 1.5 years (a good side effect was extending SWU validity through the end of the following status year, instead of 12 months).

In 2009 (link) prior to filing for bankruptcy in 2011, AA had a Letter of Intent with H-P Business Services to develop an entirely new system, to be named JetStream. This was cancelled by bankruptcy (link) and the HP-US management chose to proceed with Sabre for the new American Airlines.

They (Sabre Holdings or / and AA) may be working on a smoother process, but I'm guessing the challenges may be significant. In the meantime, were stuck with the awful current state of affairs / PITA. Being forewarned, we need to keep an eye on our bookings.

And note, I've heard there are internal policy changes affecting allowable changes, though they may not have been fully distributed yet. @JonNYC

JonNYC

Well, with the full rollout of AA self-service dynamic reaccomodation (for IRROPS) just last month, I do tend to wonder/think if this functionality (self-service rebooking for some of these schedule changes) might not be a) now possible, and, b) in the works (both speculation on my part.)

controller1

I had a January roundtrip flight with four segments and each segment changed by a few minutes. No change in equipment but Mrs. controller1 lost her seat assignments (paid first/business) on three of the four segments. Both last night and earlier today on the three segments without seat assignments, aa.com would not accept my requested seat assignments for her. I didn't have time to call in to reservations but about two hours ago I received an automated call about the flight changes and asking me to accept the changes (this type of call was a first for me).

I said "no" to the changes and was immediately transferred to an agent. The agent (one of the nicest I've encountered) was able to change our seat assignments back to our original assignments even though the online seat map indicated this was not possible. I just checked aa.com and our seat assignments are correct but it is still in a "ticket pending" status. Hopefully, the new itinerary will be ticketed and the seat assignments will hold.

rrgg

I didn't have a seat problem, but had to resolve a couple schedule changes by phone. My ticket pending status cleared in a few hours.

ijgordon

Generally they are accommodating--if they weren't then you'd see a lot more people elect to just cancel for a refund.
Notwithstanding "internal policy changes affecting allowable changes" alluded to above; not sure what that might mean.