Portolan

as I always have, but now do so more frequently/carefully, I checked all of my and Mrs. Portolan's itineraries today. Several flagged (once you open the itinerary of course, not in the trip list) as changes by a maximum of 3 minutes with no equipment changes or seat changes...just the critical 2-3 minutes.

Oh, but the flight where one leg's flight was cancelled and replaced with a flight 2 hours earlier wasn't, apparently, a change so it wasn't flagged and I wasn't required to verify this non-change.

Clearly, no one who frequents FlyerTalk would be so naive as to not check their itineraries, but it makes you wonder how many folks show up expecting their flight(s) to operate at the time per their confirmation email/web site printout and in the absence of any change notifications.

YVR Cockroach

Just got an e-mail from Orbitz that UA has changed my (OW) flight from MIA to YVR late this year. The MIA-ORD flight is now departing nearly 4 hours later and gets into ORD 50 minutes after the connecting flight departs.

So will UA fix this? I guess I could get a refund (may have to abort the trip due to a possible estate sale).

arollins

as the booking was done through them, then contact UA and see what can be done. You are obviously not going to arrive at your destination with the current routing. Are all the flights on UA? do you have a MP #? This might work to your advantage sine you mentioned that you may have to abort the trip.

RossUK666

Upon checking an itinerary I noticed that my return flight connection had been changed. No email and neither was it highlighted in red as a status change to be accepted.

I'm returning SFO-FRA-MAN in August. My FRA-MAN flight has been changed to the 0725 which is a bit of a problem as I don't land until 0945

Phoned the UK BusFirst desk on Saturday (answered within 2 mins ) and had a helpful agent sort it out and put me back on my previous flight (Ten minutes on hold while they did so).

I asked how it happened and she said something about being 'protected' after a schedule change - except that there hasn't been a schedule change

I wonder if it was because the flight I was on was BMI operated and they are no longer Star Alliance whereas the 0725 is the only LH operated flight?

Who knows?

Jackstay

I have an itinerary LAS-EWR-BRU-BCN-FRA-ORD-LAS in the fall which I booked a couple of months ago. All the legs except LAS-EWR were upgraded with GPUs at time of booking except the first (LAS-EWR), which is waitlisted (R = 0). My other half is on a separate PNR with all legs already upgraded with GPUs.

There have been a number of incremental changes to various legs since I booked, making the departure from LAS earlier in the morning, more than doubling the connection time at ORD to nearly six hours now, etc. While not happy about them, they all work, the same changes were made to my other half's itinerary, and the upgrades have stuck, so I'd rather accept them then risk screwing something up.

The past few weeks, since I accepted the last change which made the departure from LAS earlier, nearly every day I see the red schedule change notices at the top of my itinerary. Looking below, all of the lines in the itinerary are all black text except for the "extra" line at the bottom, which shows the waitlisted LAS-EWR segment. The times for this flight, which are the same as shown in the confirmed LAS_EWR economy segment line, are in red. If I accept the "change," then the red text is replaced with black text -- no change in the content, just the color. This lasts about a day. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Anybody know what is going on with this? I am concerned in general because there seems to be a problem with the reservation, and specifically worried that it might screw up the upgrade if/when R becomes available. I have not yet called reservations, thought I'd try to get educated here first.

-------

Okay, I called and talked to a very helpful res agent. She indicated that the change for the waitlisted segment was unacknowledged in the res system but was able to confirm the change at her console. It seems that the res system was not receiving the schedule change acknowledgment for the waitlisted segment from the web site, even though the web site was reflecting my acknowledgment/acceptance. (Some sort of functional disconnect between the website and the res system.) It seems as if there is some sort of sweep overnight that would then regenerate the schedule change notice.

USFdonWill

So this is the third week in a row that I have had this reservation show me this same message.

SunLover

I woke up this morning to TEN existing UA reservations that are no longer doable because of schedule changes. They are more than switching aircraft metal, or a couple of minute’s arrival/departure change which makes no material difference. I normally try to address these straight away; but for one of them at least it will be the second change, and the trip is still two months out. And most of the trips are 5-11 months away.

So I am asking for some feedback on successful strategies for dealing with these types of situations:

*Address them right away?
*Address them individually one call at a time, or try to address multiple itins on the same call?
*Wait and monitor if the schedule changes back favorably?
*Wait and use the SDC option?
*For those where connections are now tight but illegal – begin the trip and hope for a compensation situation?

I normally have alternate flights/times worked out in advance and propose them to the reservations agent when I call in, but occasionally get pushback when the fare codes are no longer available. And these are all inexpensive tickets. I usually politely disengage with the poor CSR’s and keep calling until I get a good one, but one time the conversation got so contentious I just said #%@#$ and took a future flight credit.


Thanks,
SunLover

demkr

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3)

I typically try to get them fixed in one phone call just so I don't have to think about it anymore. This is actually the first Saturday in awhile that I haven't had to clear out any changes

Often1

Fix them all at once and sooner rather than later.

1. Figure out the alternatives if any

or you want a change, for each trip so that you can make the proactive ask.

2. Waiting means less chance of capacity, same with SDC. Better options now than later.

3. If you have an illegal connection, sooner or later it will get rebooked and you will either be cancelled (& refunded) or moved to whatever is then available. But, if you do attempt and misconnect below the MCT, you won't see anything out of UA.

sbm12

Wait until the end of the weekend when the full batch of changes has been fully pushed through. Then call in and deal with the ones which need it.

channa

My biggest fear with CO and schedule change is the rogue schedule change remediation group who will unilaterally book you on something else, often by several hours, and send you your new itinerary. Since they do that, it gets marked as "accepted" in the system, which makes it another step to prove with the agent (not a big deal, just adds to the process), but worse, they can modify key flights you may have wanted to keep (e.g., that already-upgraded transcon, or that hard-to-find partner award flight).

How I deal with schedule change really varies based on the circumstance.

Basically, I try to come up with a plan to address it quickly. That doesn't mean resolve it, but I need that schedule change flag to go away.

In connections that are illegal or negative, I accept the change. This way the flag is cleared, and nobody is going to mess with my reservation until I'm ready for them to. Nobody is going to make me fly a negative connection either, so I can change it at my leisure.

For routine UA metal flights that were materially changed (e.g., 4+ hours), I let them hang. Someone will auto-accept them or put you on something else eventually, and then I'll deal with it later. It's so egregiously different than the original booking, it won't be a problem to convince them I need a change.

Anything involving a partner, I deal with immediately because I don't want them to mess with stuff. I had one YHZ-PHL-SFO (US connecting to UA) where UA made their flight earlier causing a misconnect in PHL. Instead of leaving it or prompting me to call in somehow, they unilaterally whacked YHZ-PHL and put me on an earlier YHZ-PHL which didn't work for me. That could have been problematic if I couldn't recover the original space and figure out a way to go PHL-SFO later.



But if you have lots of changes, the timing is not going to scale.

I spent 20 minutes on my last one (change to earlier flights along the same route), and 36 minutes on the one before that (change to similarly timed flights through a different hub).

Banging out 10 of these like the OP has could be a four-hour ordeal or more.

Old UA this would have been no problem -- 2-3 minutes a pop and move on. But with this current system and business process, I wouldn't attempt 10 at once.

goalie

Agreed on all points ^ and when researching alternatives, you just might be able to pick up a few extra segments and eqm's

goalie

It's that day of the week again folks-time to check and see how good or bad you fared. This week I was lucky as they were all minor.

channa

Sheesh, I had a flight go from mainline to single-cabin RJ that was already upgraded with a Regional.

Not only that, but they downgraded me into X class on a revenue booking, so even if I were to accept that, I'd have to call in to fix that anyway.

FriendlySkies

Just had four schedule changes. Mostly minor, though it's annoying that I have to go into every reservation to check.

This is one area where .bomb was superior. The red "Schedule Change" text made it easy to scan a large bunch of reservations.