I rarely fly, and I'm trying to figure this out: We were booked on flight #123 (just being hypothetical) departing at 3:15 p.m. and arriving at 5:00 p.m. I just logged onto the airline's website to find out that flight #123 no longer exists. The new flight number is #789. The seats we originally had reserved were available to anyone, and we were never notified of the change. The new flight number has the SAME times as our orignal flight; just the number is different. But we were NEVER notified.

I called the airline and was originally told it was probably just an error... Please don't worry about it. I called back and finally got someone who said our orignal flight had been canceled, and she switched us to the updated flight number.

Is this common when flying? The airline just randomly changes the flight number?

My main concern is that it could happen again before we leave...Had we arrived at the airport without my having checked the airline's website, would we have been told, "Sorry. Your flight has been canceled. We'll have to get you on another flight." Or would we have automatically been switched to the new flight number?

We have another family member flying with us who is going to have to go through this whole thing, too, and try to get his ticket changed.

Normally, you're automatically rebooked when an airline adjusts its schedule. Airlines do this several times a year, but not all flights are affected, you were just "lucky" enough to be on one of them.

However, you should periodically check your reservation to see if anything has changed. A common occurrence is for your seat reservations to be switched, leaving your party scattered around the plane.

It's also possible that the change will have a new flight time that's unworkable, or a connection that's impossible. I had a change on Delta that left 15 minutes for an international to domestic connection. In these cases, you have to call and get it fixed.

At the very minimum, you should check a day or two before for the exact flight times in case they've changed. (Back in the Elder Days before the internet, we had to call the airline the day before to confirm the flight times.)

It would be nice if the airline would call or e-mail you, and sometimes they do, but you can't count on it.

I never experencied this before, but this year I first look to my reservation to see that our seats were changed. My wife and oldest kids somewhere in the front, I was in the middle and our youngest (4yr) was in the back. So I called immediately to change this back. Later I rechecked to find out that they changed the plane, what caused the problems (MD11->747-400).

I decided to call again the next day for a seatchange, because the seatconfiguration is somewhat different - to find out that the flight was cancelled (!). They were rebooking us from a direct flight to a flight with one stop, and because I called at the time they were rebooking I could arrange the exact seats I wanted - I was the first in line The change was for tuesday/thursday flights only.

Then after a few days they changed the time - no big problem. But they did contact me about this change.

Later I was contacted that the exact same flight three months later (when my sister with her family is on that flight) was cancelled and changed exactly the way our flight was changed. They changed the schedule again, now the saturday-flight was involved - and the thursday flight was changed back to the direct flight.

So in many years never had a problem with this (okay, most flights were booked short before departure), now several in a short time.

So, the flight exists, but with a different flight number. No problem, right? I gather your concern was over your seat assignments. While seat assignments are not always guaranteed (e.g., for some seats, those with disabilities get priority, even if already assigned to someone else), this sounds like a minor worry overall. I do not understand your concern about your family member's flight. If you're that concerned over the same thing happening to them, just keep monitoring the airline's Web site.