Yet another reminder to keep checking your reservations
 

A week ago, we made reservations on AA for a cross-country trip involving one connection each way (ORD or DFW) for mid-May. We normally choose connections that are at least 90 minutes or more, so we look carefully at our choices to avoid those breathless "Terminal A to Terminal W" connections, or that helpless feeling when you can SEE your arrival gate while you're sitting on the tarmac for 20 min. and your next flight is boarding.

In the process of checking on a reservation coming up in 3 weeks, I idly clicked on the later reservation. Every flight number was changed, two of the legs were switched so that we had less than 45 min. layover, and all seats had been changed.

I called reservations PDQ, and fortunately, I could reconstruct itineraries that came close to our original ones, but we couldn't get seats together on the "two" side of the MD83 for one of the legs.

Can you imagine the mess if I hadn't checked the flights until sometime in April?

<i> One more time: It's worth checking all your itineraries, at least once a week. </i>

(And PS: I'd guess that AA has done a lot of renumbering for future flights this past week, so heads up.)

HKP:

Did you give AA a valid phone number when you booked your tickets? If so, I'm just wondering why they did not attempt to call you about the change. If not, then I guess another lesson is to make sure the airline has a working, valid phone number to reach you in case they need to.

Last year, USAir changed my flights without calling. If I hadn't checked, I would have had a problem. ((*))

AA does this alot. For our honeymoon flight, they changed around our flight dates, times of departure and number of stops. They said they sent an email and made a phone call which neither myself or my husband received and we are both AA frequent flyers members. After that I checked AA a couple of times a week and daily as we got closer to our honeymoon departure.

AA doesn't call unless it's day-of-departure and there's a last-minute change (and sometimes even that doesn't happen). Neither does UA or, I suspect, most other major airlines.

You can sign up for &quot;flight alert&quot; or some such, so that an automatic computer call is directed to your designated phone at a given time before the flight -- e.g., you can specify having them call your cell 3 hrs. before departure. But that's it.

Ya gotta keep track, yourself.