Be careful when SDCing on which day is offered
 

You know how you can view available alternate flights at the 24 hour mark of your original scheduled flight? Well I am booked on a 7 am flight tomorrow sna-den-ord. When I checked in this morning I wanted to see what other options I had for tomorrow. The non stop at 10.30 am popped up "confirm change for $0". Sweet. I immediately changed it and was pretty pleased.

Fast forward to 10 minutes ago. I'm sitting on a coference call bored as hell so I take a quick look at my BP for tomorrow. Um it's for TODAY. I just assumed all options to change were for tomorrow (the original day of travel) but this is not the case. Just make sure you take a good look at the date of the flight you want to change.

This almost happened to me too. It was one of those cases where I was just about to click on it and suddenly realized my flight would be taking off in an hour instead of the next day. Love the feature, but maybe they should have a special note appear that makes you aware of this. Easy mistake to make.

Yup. The SDC rule is 24/24. You can change within 24 hours of your booked flight, to any flight within 24 hours of your request. Which means you can go almost a full day earlier or later.

You said you were bored with the conference call... Well there's your excuse to get out of it... "Oh sorry I gotta get to the airport... Bye!"

I double check and then triple check my reservations for dates and times... I've never missed a flight because I've had the date or time wrong in my head. Come close a couple times because I just can't seem to get out of the house and on the road early enough!

No; I know how you can view available alternate flights within 24h of your original scheduled flight and 24h of the alternate flights.

It is pretty nice how they let you bring your flight forward almost a full day; far more generous than most airlines policies.

Very true. UA has excellent SDC policies.
DL's on he other hand, is worthless.

Well, this has nothing to do with the app. The next day 10.30 am departure option will not show up at 7.00 am today.

This is by far the biggest reason I fly United. I love that for work travel if I finish up a project early, I can get a confirmed seat earlier and not have to standby. For personal I love that when I book far in advance I know that I can still change when the time comes. And the fact that I can turn a layover into a a quick stopover to visit friends The amount of money it's saved me on change fees is insane.

True. When I made this exact mistake, it was on line at UA.com.

Fortunately, a helpful 1K agent was able to quickly correct my mistake!

I know this has nothing to do with the app. I was generalizing. It's a great feature the SDC and I use it extensively. I'm just warning others to ensure they look carefully at the date you are selecting so you don't screw up like I did. Now I'm booked for tomorrow sna-sfo-ord. The sfo-ord is on a dark, wifi-less 753.

So I guess you answered my own question why tomorrow's 10.30 flight isn't showing up as a possibility of changing to...it's not at the 24 hour mark. Hopefully it will pop up later this morning and I'll snag it.

Worthless?

DL's difference is that the new flight has to be on the same day as the original. So you can't move it +/- a day, but you have a bigger window in some cases.

I called the other day at 1pm, exactly 24 hours out, to move a 1pm flight the next day to 6pm. With CO I would have ad to wait another 5 hours to make that change, who knows if space would still have been there, and little chance at CPU since CO runs a big CPU at 24 hours.

Also, DL has any F bucket availability for paid F customers who SDC. The new flight can be F1, you're booked in some discounted F bucket, but you can have it anyway. That is more generous than CO's policy.

I never trust their website or app within a 48-hour window. If there's a flight I want, I make a note of it and call the 1K desk. (Now the whoever-in-the-he77-calls-in desk.)

It's been a year or two since I used DL SDC as I am no longer elite with them... but then you could only call within 3 hours of the new flight and be within 24 hours of the original flight. Every time I tried my fare bucket was not available. Is the DL policy different now?

I guess to be fair I should just say the DL policy was worthless to me. ;)

This exact thing happened to me last year. Wanted to switch to an earlier flight for the next day and it switched me over to that day. I didn't know about it until I got a call on my cell phone from the gate agent asking if I was going to make the flight.

I don't fault UA for offering a generous SDC policy but the mobile app is confusing and can trip you up if you're not careful.

Been there done that, a 1K agent quickly fixed that.