lakeside77

I found a topic on here that discussed options you have when a change is made to your flight schedule. But I can't find it now. Can anyone help? I have 2 tickets booked with flyer miles on Delta and they've made a change to the schedule. Do I have any options? I remember something about the amount of time difference determining something.

AAFrequentFlyer

You basically have 3 options:

1. Accept the changes

2. Call the airline and request flights that are closer to your original booking.

3. Request a total refund of cash/miles without paying any penalty fees.

btw, you can't ask for different days of travel, different destination, different class of service, etc...

If the schedule change is just few minutes, up to ~2 hours, then your options are limited. You may convince the agent to do a refund but it's not a guarantee. The above 3 options are usually good if the change is more than 1 or 2 hours plus.




Reporting from Dubai Hilton. On the way home.

NoFlyZone

>btw, you can't ask for different days of travel, different destination, different class of service, etc...

Actually you can, provided the conditions are right, that generally being availability of flights in the first place.

I live roughly equidistant from several DL cities and last year a schedule change on the return resulted in a misconnect which would require an overnight in ATL. As I had no car at the airport (would be picked up) I requested a flight to a different airport and they happily complied.

For a flight later this year, they cancelled a flight on the outbound (on a once daily route) and moved me a day later. I requested, and received, flights on the day previous to the original.

Patty

If the schedule change is 90 min or greater, you can request a change to the flights you prefer (regardless of award availability if it's a DL operated flight but sometimes you have to press the agent to override) or redeposit your award. Either way there should be no fee. If it's under 90 min, I'd still give it a try as I've had luck a few times with schedule changes in the 60-90 min range.

BarbAnn

I had this problem yesterday with AA. I had booked flights with FF miles SMF to ZRH with a return from MXP. They TOTALLY changed the schedule. I called AA and got a very nice agent. She worked about 45 minutes giving me other options...via London, via New York, on AA, BA or AS, from SMF or SFO. It turned out that the flights we were on between SMF/DFW/SMF had both been cancelled. Anyway, we ended up with flights out of SFO instead of Sacramento.

Call DL and see what they can do for you.

lakeside77

I appreciate all the help. It's really hard to find any of this info on Delta's website - hmmm...wonder why.

rkkwan

No airline publishes this. There are too much grey area, and they don't want all these people calling to demand all the changes.

yestravel

Several times when there have been schedule changes the airline has changed our flight to different days at our request. This has happened with FF tixs and with paid tixs. This just happend with UA on our flight to Venice. We didn't like the schedule change and decided to see if we could go a day earlier and they changed it for us.

iowamom

Several times on different airlines we've received schedule change notifications (more likely the earlier you book, I have found) - and all times the airlines have been accomodating and never charged us more and always gave us the flights we wanted. At least once the change resulted in a non-stop flight being replaced by a change in planes as well - we managed to rebook on a non-stop at a different time of day.

djkbooks

Whenever this has happened to me, and it's happened often, I've checked the schedule, chosen the most convenient alternate flights, phoned, and had the flights changed no charge.

Last year, our return flight from Paris was removed from the schedule and we were rebooked on a much earlier flight, which would have been okay. But, with a phone call I was able to have us easily changed to a later flight, much more convenient for us.

lakeside77

Update - finally decided to call Delta about the flight schedule change. They were very willing to work with us on the schedule and were very helpful. The original rep couldn't do what we needed so she decided to get a supervisor to work on it with us. Every minute or two on hold, she would come back on and give me updates as to what the supervisor was doing.

Finished result - actually leaving Hawaii 1 hour later than planned and arriving 4 hours earlier than the changed flight at our return destination.

Delta was great today to work with!

rkkwan

Speaking of Delta, I like their online chat. Much better than talking to India.