When is Midnight?
 

I recently made a reservation that hasn't yet been ticketed. The confirmation indicates:
We will hold this reservation until midnight Mon., Mar. 1, 2010 in New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty).


So when is midnight? Is it just after 11:59 Sunday evening or after 11:59 Monday evening? Common usage has it that Monday at 12:00am (which is a "midnight") is between SUnday and Monday. Monday at 2400 would, however, be the midnight between Monday and Tuesday. I suspect that CO means "midnight" to signify the end of a day not the beginning, but an earlier reservation apparently cancelled out at the "midnight" starting the designated day. To avoid confusion, they perhaps should say the reservation will be held to 11:59pm on Monday, March 1st.

I agree 100% and have wondered the same thing a few times.

Waaaay back when I was a pharmacist practicing in a hospital, we used to prepare IVs, some of which were due to be started at midnight. I felt it was critical that everyone understood the when to administer them. As such, I instituted a policy that all meds scheduled for 'midnight' administration were labled "12:01AM, x/xx/xxxx. In this way, there could be no confusion.

Scott, if you read this, you might consider this suggestion as a simple IT change that will avoid a lot of confusion/phone calls.

A Wikipedia entry on this subject states

"The use of "12:00 midnight" or "midnight" is still problematic because it does not distinguish between the midnight at the start of a particular day and the midnight at its end. To avoid confusion and error, some U.S. style guides recommend either clarifying "midnight" with other context clues, or not referring to midnight at all. For an example of the latter method, "midnight" is replaced with "11:59 p.m." for the end of a day or "12:01 a.m." for the start of the next day. That has become common in the United States in legal contracts and for airplane, bus, or train schedules, though some schedules use other conventions."

Obviously CO has left room for confusion.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9630/4.7.1.40 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

In CO parlance midnight is 2359 Central Time on the date noted.

If you held it online, it's really something like 5pm that day (unless they fixed that bug).

I think there must still be a bug. I had a reservation that was supposed to be held to Midnight Saturday, which I assume as SBM indicates was 11:59 last night. WHen I went to look at it yesterday evening, it was gone, although it was was there earlier in the day. I was able to rebook however.

Yeah, the auto-cancel process is probably looking at GMT (or they're setting it to GMT when they create the hold). Or something like that. It's been like that for years.

If you made reservation today, then they'll hold it till Tue 12:00 AM Central Time

Not if held online.

It still existed a few weeks ago. They say "til midnight" but it really only holds until ~5PM central time.

And are you saying 12:00am Tuesday is at the beginning of Tuesday (ie. 00:01am) or the end of Tuesday which is really almost Wednesday (11:59pm)?

You mean 1 minute after "2359 Central Time on the date noted," right? Yes, I know that would technically be the next day, but this is CO's conundrum, not mine. ;)

Monday 23:59+1 minute

thanks everyone. I'm calling an agent today before 5:00pm even-though they say they will hold until Midnight Monday, March 1, which in my little brain registers as tomorrow (Monday night) a minute after 11:59pm. I can see that the semantics of "midnight" is ripe for a lot of confusion.