Ooooh, Clifton! That's downright criminal! To come back and reinstate your flight after you have to swallow the 10 hour layover! Truly, your story makes me feel like we're just so many cattle being herded about....by air cowboys! I really would have been ticked, and all that anger is bad karma. Not good for the blood pressure either. I wish that the airlines would just treat their customers more reasonably, but I realize that that's being naive. But, as the saying goes, there ought to be a law against it--in terms of that kind of maneuver! I wonder if enough people protested to their representatives, whether the airlines would have to adhere to original flight arrangements instead of putting the onus upon their customers to keep checking their reservations, essentially appeasing and accomodating the airlines' marketing maneuvers.

letour

altamiro... yes and no. We thought about stayin in Zurich... but we will have been travlling in 5 cities over 17 days... and we thought about it, and we would rather not pack and move on again.... it's an expensive decision we know... but worth our sanity at that point. The car is picking us up at the hotel and dropping us off at the terminal and saves us train rides, packing, checking in and a cab....

kerouac: to give you another case why it's good to check often even if you book far in advance: Delta's schedule totally changed for flights I have in May, and the computer moved me completely to a different flight from ATL to JFK [beats me why], one that arrives at JFK at 4:55 instead of 2:30. Meanwhile, my JFK-AMS flight time got changed to leave JFK at 4:56. I had to call the agent and stay on hold for ages to get it sorted out and put on a different ATL-JFK flight, especially since I was flying on an award ticket. If I hadn't checked and hadn't found out about the conflict until April or so, I may have been out of luck!!

The kicker is that the agent told me all casually that sometimes the computer makes scheduling mistakes like that when the schedules get moved around. So I learned my lesson: checkety check check.

Oh yeah, and every one of my seat assignments had disappeared! Merci beaucoup!

unbelievable. After making my post above, I checked my itinerary again for the heck of it...yep, Air France had cancelled one of my flights and I had to call and be rebooked on another one. Sadly, that did not involve getting to stay in Paris an extra day. ;-)

Checkety check check. I'm getting paranoid at this rate!