Cancellation vs schedule change
 

I booked B6 615 JFK-SFO several months ago. Today I received an email stating that I was now on B6 515, two hours later.

JetBlue is telling me this is a schedule change, not a cancellation. Since it it less than three hours' difference, I am not entitled to free rebooking.

Flight 615 no longer exists on my day of travel. Flight 515 has always existed.

How can an airline remove a flight from the schedule, move passengers to a different pre-existing flight, and claim that there was no cancellation?. An hour on the phone and escalation to a supervisor didn't get me anywhere. According to JetBlue, removal of a flight from the schedule is not a cancellation, if the passenger is rebooked. Nothing would ever be a cancellation under this reasoning.

When I asked where I could find what JetBlue considers to be a cancellation, I was only directed to the Contract of Carriage (which does not define a cancellation), and "the website."

And is it worthwhile to file a DOT complaint about this?

As of December, you are no longer entitled to a refund per the DoT rules if the flight number changes. However, you are entitled to a refund for a schedule change of more than three hours. B6 is free to offer you whatever reaccomodation they would like but these are your rights under DoT regs.

If a flight is removed from the timetable in advance (weeks/months out), it is almost always coded as a schedule change, not a cancellation.

JetBlue’s policy, while a bit less generous than Delta's and United's (2-hour threshold), is more generous than American's, which is 4 hours.

These are airline policy decisions—not DOT mandates—so accordingly, a DOT complaint is unlikely to succeed.

A better strategy is probably to call back and speak with a different agent. Ask for an “even exchange due to involuntary schedule change.” If there's an earlier departure available, you could press for that for no change in price.

So basically under the administration's new rules, the disappearance of a flight from a carrier's schedule is meaningless.
There is no such thing as a 'cancellation' so long as the passenger is rebooked without "significant change or delay," meaning +/- 3 hours.

I already spent over an hour on the phone asking for a change to the earlier departure. I'm not much inclined to try again.