lucycan

Had a MSP to LIR direct booked earlier this year for JAN 2021. About 2 months ago they killed the direct and put us through ATL each way.

Yesterday I just happened to look at the routing and see that the direct is back! I called DL and they put us back on that.

Question: Had I not saw this change back, and not called, would Delta have ever said anything?

Often1

No. No carrier would.

lucycan

Sad.

cre95

Why? Maybe you intended to stop in Atlanta and you wouldn’t like it if they forced you to a direct flight. I would imagine Delta would just keep the latest flight info rather than the whole history of changes to then try and do analysis every time a new flight is added or reinstated in the network.

I once had a flight ATL-LGA-BOS and upon waking up I noticed that Delta had changed my flight overnight to ATL-BOS. I had booked my original itinerary with plans to go into the city for a meeting before heading back to the airport to then fly to Boston for a dinner meeting there. Not helpful for the software to do a sweep and decide they knew better.

I get that in your case you had originally booked the direct flight to Liberia but that got pulled off their network, maybe you had adjusted and planned otherwise.

MSPeconomist

There have been reports of GAs switching passengers to nonstop flights when an initial connecting segment is overbooked, with no choice and no VDB/IDB compensation. This is allowed if the nonstop arrives not much later than the originally booked connection. Unfortunately, it often results is bad seat assignments compared to what had been booked.

flyerCO

The time factor only comes into play for IDB. Even in that case one hour is the limit for not getting paid. They are still required by law to ask for volunteers before IDB.

I haven't heard of anyone complaining of this post Dr Dao era. In fact DL has stated they want zero IDB.

Often1

Also has nothing to do with OP's issue.

Bottom line is that if DL had auto-switched a passenger back to the nonstop, there would have been someone complaining that they had made other plans based on the change and had not wanted to be switched back.

If you want something, ask for it.

paperwastage

I guess OP's ask is

"I booked nonstop
ScheduleChange#1 no more nonstop, rebooked me to 1-stoo
ScheduleChange#2, nonstop reappear. Please detect my original itinerary was nonstop, and at least offer to rebook me (maybe not auto rebook, in case my own plans changed)"

This may be difficult?
ScheduleChange#1 to remove nonstop, easy to lookup existing passengers on flight and rebook
ScheduleChange#2 to add a flight (likely different flight #, maybe slightly different time too), run a database query to figure out who was on a similar flight that was deleted, was rebooked, and offer to un-rebook them? Person may have accepted flight +/- 24 hours or even longer

Not a trivial search, and may take some processing power