iahphx

I often plan my Frontier travel about 2 months ahead of time. That's when I generally know where I need to be, and start looking for their crazy cheap fare sales. There's one major problem with this strategy: what I book two or more months in advance is almost NEVER what I actually get to fly. About 90% of the time, my flight times change by more than a hour, and often by more than 6 hours. Obviously, this can often be super inconvenient. Frontier will generally only make it easy to rebook flights on the same day, but that often doesn't work. Like if you're booked to fly out at 9 am, you don't want to fly out at 9 pm. They don't automatically offer you the option to fly a day before or after: you have to endure the Chat feature if you want to switch days.

I assume this greatly annoys many travellers unfamiliar with Frontier's complete lack of interest in sticking to their existing schedule. You definitely don't want to book any firm plans based on your initially scheduled arrival time. I don't think I've had a material schedule change less than a few weeks out, but you can almost always be certain that your flight time will change if you book two months prior. It's annoying.

hobo13

In 2+ years and a couple dozen F9 flights, I think I've only once had a significant schedule change, and that includes many flights >2 months. And I managed to parlay that into the day before which was better for me anyway.

I fly United a lot less these days, but 5-10 years ago the same question could be asked about their schedule. There were always schedule changes. The difference I guess is that on F9, you pretty much take it or leave it, and on United, they'll generally be able to get you something close-ish.

If this is a problem for you, here would be my strategy:

Book your F9 flight.
Then also book a backup on United.
Most likely you'll just end up cancelling the United flight, and getting a credit which you can then use to "protect" your next F9 flight.

Some will say that's hassle. Sure. But everything about Frontier is a hassle to some degree, lol. But oh the savings....

jjbiv

Weird, the links Frontier sends me after a schedule change will let me change by at least +/- one day. A week would be better for some of their less frequent routes but I've been able to get by so far.

iahphx

Interesting. I've never gotten a link that allowed me to select anything other than same day. Even when my original flight was a red eye that left a couple minutes after midnight and they moved the flight (with, sadly, a different flight number) to a few minutes before midnight. In that case, they only offered me the flight leaving 23 hours and 50 minutes later! Yesterday, a had a more typical situation where I was booked on a once-daily morning flight that they moved to the evening. If I wanted to fly the day before (which I now needed to), I had to start the chat feature and plead my case.

BTW, it could be completely random, but lately, I seem to be getting better agents on the chat line. I summarize my problem and request a specific solution that I have reseached. They've now been better at "reading comprehension." My biggest problem -- other than getting the chat function to queue me up to actually chat with an agent -- is wait time. The wait seems to average about 15 minutes, so I move on to something else. I'd love there to be some online tool that would chime when somebody starts responding to the chat request: can you make your computer speak their responses or something?

lowfareair

Same here - I haven't had any major schedule changes and have probably booked over a dozen flights in the last year at least 2 months out.

hobo13

I even started a thrad a few months back about better chat helpfulness.

The wait time originally was awful, but it's been pretty fast (like <2--3 mins) lately. I just put that webpage on one of my 4 monitors, and the motion catches my eye when they show up. A beep would be nice though.

iahphx

Don't get too comfortable. I book flights throughout their system, originating/terminating at their various "focus cities" -- and I can detect no rhyme or reason to the constant schedule changes. (I do fly midweek most of the time if that might matter). The only flights I haven't seen materially change are the ones where no other flight time is commercially plausible: like flights to and from a Caribbean island. Frankly, I am mathematically astonished that you could have a dozen Frontier flights with no schedule changes and I could have a dozen flights where 10 or 11 had material schedule changes. I'm actually happy when I get the "inevitable" email telling me my flight has "only" moved by, say, an hour and a half.

Like everything else about them, Frontier's Chat wait times seem to vary a lot. My average wait time for my last 4 chats was about 15 minutes. I usually try to Chat after I've received an email notifying me of a flight change (that I can't fix myself online). I'm thinking I should "schedule" my Chats for early morning/late night instead when fewer people would likely have a service need. Aren't the Chats serviced in the Phillipines? If so, their staffing may not coincide with peak USA call times.

lowfareair

To clarify - I haven't had zero schedule changes, just no major ones. I think the biggest was 30ish minutes or so. All domestic flights. Although I'm certainly tempting fate by saying that with several flights currently booked for June and July...

iahphx

My early June flight changed by almost 10 hours, so don't make firm plans.

Last summer I took a connecting award flight from SEA because the alternative on a "real" airline was about 500 bucks each (summer fares -- boo!), It was a continuing fiasco of flight changes. At the end, we had to spend a night at a DEN airport motel to make a "connection" on the route. Knock wood, but so far I have no connecting flights on Frontier this summer. I am throwing in a 2 day visit to Vegas to avoid a similar problem, though. Hopefully, it stays around 2 days!

willy702

You may just be running lucky. The changes I have dealt with are on routes with a lot of flights, rarely do I fly one of their routes with just one flight a day. The problem I have with them is that they do some nonsense like they will have a 9:45pm and 10:15pm flight out of LAS. I'll book one fo them and they will cancel it at about that 45-60 day window before the flight. They NEVER change me onto the flight 30 minutes away. NEVER. Its always some BS putting me either on the 12:30am that gets into DEN at 4am or the 6am flight. To add insult to injury they say something in the rebooking about how they are doing us a favor by rebooking us onto this other flight. If I wasn't so used to it I'd want to throw something at the screen having to listen to such annoying behavior and language.

This kind of stuff is rampant and its hard to get them to change you onto the logical flight. And good luck trying to explain to the chat agents why a flight at 12:30am on the same day is utterly stupid, I'm 99% convinced none of those Filipino agents have ever even been on a plane, let alone tried to book a trip of just a few days where if you screw someone out of a full day you really wreck the trip. Only thing you can do is cancel and get a refund on the flight, then go book the other flight with the funds and hope they don't pull that crap again in the next few days. And never book a non-refundable hotel or car for the trip.