Do airlines have a regular calendar for introducing schedules, say March and October?

From past experience, I know that an individual flight can change plenty of times by a few minutes here and there, but I'm wondering about widespread schedule decisions, and whether there is some kind of regular pattern for schedule announcements.

I'm guessing not.

Most airlines change the schedule during the spring forward and fall fallback times. And perhaps also at the beginning of summer and beginning of December.

They often finalize those changes about 3 months prior to those dates.

That's the general guidelines, with tonnes of exceptions.

Thanks, rk; that's just whatI wanted to know.

I have a program that displays the Continental flight schedule. It last updated February 9, and when I checked just now it said an update was available, which was dated February 16.

However, this schedule displays quite a bit of information, including what type of plane is being used, so while technically they update it about weekly, major changes are far less frequent. For instance, if they decide to end a friday flight to houston a week earlier than planned in June, and replace it with a similar, but slightly different flight, that shows up as a change, but it very well may affect noone. They also have a lot of flights that are, for lack of a better word, seasonal. So if you are talking about a saturday flight to XXX, but they know it will end in May, some might think of that as a change.

clevelandbrown - CO updates the schedule for the desktop program every weekend, regardless of whether there's new info or not.

And it's also not necessarily up-to-the-minute. A lot of new routes and schedules are announced mid-week, and it sometimes take several days, or even several days + one week before it's reflected in the program.

FWIW -- I booked 2 tickets [one reward, one paid] in August 2007 for a trip from Durango Colorado to Syracuse NY in May 2008.

I just happened to think about them in early January and out of curiosity, checked our itineraries.

Imagine my surprise to find that one leg of the flight had changed and we now arrived in SYR 4 hours later than original ticket. That wasn't the best part, one one leg the flight was changed so that we arrived AFTER the next leg departed! Called Delta and they fixed it so we arrived before the next leg left. But we still got in 4 hours later than original. That really didn't help a trip that was already taking 12 hours!!

The agent I talked to suggested that I check every month just to be sure.

Sure enough, the same thing happened in early Feb. This time I actually got lucky.

I had accumulated enough miles for another award ticket. The agent that worked with us got us the second ticket as an award and also rerouted us so we arrived in SYR at the same time as original flights. There was NO charge to make changes since again, they had us on a leg that arrived after the next leg departed!

IF that wasn't good enough, we got a full refund for the amount paid on the original purchased ticket because THEY made the change and it resulted in a bad schedule. There was some code she mentioned, but it was something that indicated that it was not customer's fault.

I am sure this will happen again before all is said and done.

BTW - the agent that helped me in Feb spent more than 1 hour with me trying to find flights that would work with my original reward ticket and the new one. I was really impressed.

Deb

When an airline makes schedule changes, you can basically change to whatever flight you want, as long as there are open seats, regardless of fare class.

So, it can work to your advantage, and I have certainly benefited from it before.

As long as you keep checking, and you are on a route with enough alternative, things are usually not that bad.

That is true, Ray. We kept the same departure and arrival cities, dates of departure and return which is why we were able to get the full refund on the original paid ticket [that and the fact that we didn't iniate the change]

We ended up flying through Detroit instead of JFK; using NWA and Delta. On return, we ended up leaving a little later and getting home at same time, but we did improve connection time and splitting a pretty long lay over time so that it was more evenly divided in DTW and SLC.

I have learned that reward tickets can present a challenge; flexibility a must and lots of patience.

I used 37,500 miles for my ticket, by the time I was able to get DH ticket, it was 60,000. The value on mine now shows 60,000 too.

This won't be the last time they flight change, I'd be willing to bet.

Deb

In July, we booked 5 award flights on Delta from Nashville to Barbados via Atlanta. Delta had regular flights 4 days per week, so we chose Sat May 17-Mon May 26,2008. (10 day trip with only 5 vacation days)

There have been a lot of minor schedule changes involving a few minutes or an hour here or there. Delta was very willing to shift flights around if changes caused us to miss connections. (mildly annoying, but not a big deal)

On Jan 25th we noticed our return had been moved from Mon May 26 to Sun May 25. We called. Mon. flights to/from Barbados have been cancelled for May.

On Feb 17 our departure had changed from Sat May 17 to Sun May 18. We called. Sat flights to/from Barbados have been cancelled for May.

At some points Thursday flights were cancelled too, because its Mon. only for May (no Delta partners fly to Barbados)

We've been told that our choices are (1) lose 2 days from our vacation (2) cancel the whole thing and get our miles re-deposited (3) fly May 17-26 to some place near Barbados and buy tickets for the Barbados leg from another carrier.

If we choose Option 3, $1000 is the lowest rate we have found to get the 5 of us to/from St Lucia for our "free" Delta flights.

We wonder if this is just what happens in May or if some kind of problem has occured? Delta reps say they do not know. Does anyone else know or do you have any ideas?