Just a heads up if you have reservations with Delta. We booked a flight to Cancun in January thru Orbitz on Delta. Because Delta has dropped many flights, the connection from Atlanta to Cancun was rerouted thru Mexico City, adding 4 more hours to our travel time. Neither Delta nor Orbitz notified me of the change (luckily I decided to check on my own!) In all fairness, Orbitz spent a fair amount of time with me trying to help, and finally got me a full refund so I could book on another airline.

I would imagine that this is not a uniquely Delta experience. With the hurrican devestation near Cancun, I am sure flight traffic is WAY DOWN resulting in flight cancellations and rerouting.

More and more posts about reservation problems with Orbitz, this is disturbing! Thank you for heads up.

Is this an Orbitz problem or an airline problem?

I recently received a notification from NW that my Christmas Eve flights have changed as well. I booked the flights on www.nwa.com.

You realize, of course, that Orbitz is OWNED by a consortium of airlines and as I recall Delta is one of those.

This happened to my daughter today.
She is booked to fly Delta to Brussels over Christmas. They cancelled her flight, put her on different flights that did not make the right connections and did not tell her. She found out when she just thought to check on things online.
She has to drive out to the airport to get the new paper tickets..really screwed up her plans .

And my daughter did not use Orbitz. She booked the flights herself, months ago.

I had Delta make changes to my flight plans recently (Newark to Anchorage). They were free Skymiles tickets and Delta did contact me (both via email and phone) to tell me of the changes.

In fact, it worked out in my favor (my return flight was originally Anc to SLC to Cleveland to Newark. New flight was Anc to SLC to EWR with a short layover.

Sometimes you get lucky!

The airlines change their schedules almost once a month. American Airlines updates their schedules usually around the first of the month. Often they are minor tweaks in times, but sometimes they are significant. The earlier you buy your ticket, the more likely your schedule will change between purchase date and travel date. I don't think it's Orbitz - it's the airlines. They drop routes, rearrange times, etc based on demand, projected use, etc. If you are a frequent flyer on a particular airline, and book directly on their website, you will usually get advance notice of these changes. But if you are an infrequent flyer or book thru a 3rd party, you may not. It pays to check your reservations a couple of times particularly if you bought the tickets more than about 6 weeks prior to your departure.

In this particular instance, I'm certain that MikeT is correct - every airline has rearranged it's Cancun connections because of the hurricane. No airline will fly 12 half empty flights into Cancun if they can fly 5 full ones by rearranging schedules.

Delta has changed our Denver flt in Jan a couple of times with no notification. Prior to their financial troubles, they always emailed me of changes as have other airlines. I booked 1st class seats with mileage and they changed 2 of the 4 legs to coach but were still planning to charge me 1st class mileage amts!! Finally had to speak to a supervisor to get it straightened out. After being told all 1st class seats were booked (I booked this in JUNE!)and an hour of "discussion", they put us back in 1st class and we had our pick of seats. Turns out, 1st class was empty! Of course, if they close down prior to our trip, I may have no seats. I really resent being shabbily.

So, we all need to continually check all our flts on our own and not assume that the airline or the online sites will necessarily notify us of changes.

Thanks for the info on Delta. I checked my December reservations and found that Delta had changed the return flight connection to an earlier flight that left an hour before I arrived. A call fixed the problem but I had received no notification of the change.

Delta has a terrible habit of doing this. Once they called and left a message with our then 11 year old son saying that our flights were changed and then they hung up!

It's funny that no one in my family has ever received a phone call or email about schedule changes. And we fly quite a bit.

To rely on the airline or an agent to notify you about schedule changes is asking for trouble.