Fallout from AA bankruptcy: JFK-SXM direct flight cancelled

[Anne S]

So it begins. The direct flight I had booked from JFK to St. Maarten does not exist anymore. Instead, AA has us on a flight connecting in Miami, leaving at the ungodly hour of 5:45 AM. The irony is that I booked AA expressly because of the direct flight.

 

[Laurie]

Not a brand new state of affairs... A few months ago, the perfect flight I had booked from Rome to the US on AA ff miles was cancelled. I had booked a stay in the destination/departure city in the first place expressly because of that flight.

When it got cancelled and changed, it was too late to change destinations, so we had to get picked up at our apartment at 4-something am. I'm not a morning person, I literally would've chosen somewhere else to go!

 

[vacationcrazy]

We had our flights booked to saint Lucia in march 2012 flying into slu airport. I called American about an unrelated matter and the recording said "I see one of your flights has been cancelled for march 2012. When I spoke with an agent, he said they no longer have that flight on a Saturdays and worst part about it was that it had happened two months before I found out. If I had not called, when would I have found out I was able to rebook into the other airport which is a 90 minute drive to the resort. If I was notified sooner I could have gotten a jet blue direct flight into that airport unfortunately, we just have to deal with what the airlines do if we want to travel

 

[Carolinian]

This seems to be a problem with many airlines. I just got a notice by email from WizzAir that my flight into London for a UK timeshare exchange was moved from Sarturday to Sunday. Wizz only flies that route 6 days a week once a day. For a Saturday to Saturday timeshare, Sunday just will not do, so my choice is 1) rebooking on Wizz for Friday and renting a hotel room for the extra night, 2) changing my departure city to another one that has daily flights on Wizz to London which would involve additional transportation to get to the departure city, or 3) getting a refund and using BMI miles one directiion and a sale fare with another airline from Wizz the other way (OW here is often economical, unlike in the states, and BMI allows OW award bookings for half the miles). Given the looming BA takeover of BMI and the resulting devaluation of miles there, my inclination is #3.

But it can work out to your advantage. RyanAir rescheduled one of my flights on a previous timeshare exchange to a flight that would not have worked well. However, due to demands at work, I had cancelled the exchange and was expecting to just eat the air tickets. With this change in schedule, I was able to get them to refund a non-refundable ticket.

 

[california-bighorn]

Flight cancelled into La Paz

Two years ago Alaska Airlines reduced the number of days they flew into La Paz from LAX. And as luck would have it, one of the days flights were cancelled was the day we booked for a TS stay in La Paz. They gave us a choice of traveling earlier or later, but it was inconvenient due to work schedules and the check in day at the TS. We ended up going a day later and booked a hotel room on the end of our week. Alaska Airlines was great in giving us flight credit to compensate for our cost of the hotel.

 

[dougp26364]

Unfortunately, this issue plagues all airlines regardless of their financial status. Every time we've booked Hawaii there's been a reduction in the number of flights and the "perfect" flight I've booked has become the nighmarish flight I was trying to avoid. At least this year I was able to get us changed to something that was close to our original flight.

If you book a flight to far in advance, you risk the airline making changes to your plans. It's rare that I don't have a time change at the very least. Ailrines are always trying to cut costs and combine flights whenever they can, and they do it often.

 

[winger]

From experience, aa is pretty bad at notifying passengers of flight changes.

 

[Timeshare Von]

One of my favorite "changes" was on AirTran when I bought a direct Milw to PHX ticket for the two of us over the summer. Later in the year, they canceled the direct flight and had us connecting through ATL (ARGH!!!).

Four months later, the reinstated the direct flight from MKE for the winter snow bird travel I suppose, and I had to fight to get them to change me back to what I had originally booked and paid for.

 

[Anne S]

From experience, aa is pretty bad at notifying passengers of flight changes.

Actually, AA has not notified me. I discovered the change when I turned on my ipod and the flight tracker app that I had loaded on it notified me.

 

[winger]

Actually, AA has not notified me. I discovered the change when I turned on my ipod and the flight tracker app that I had loaded on it notified me.

"bad communication" includes NOT notifying customers. I am unsure how widespread this practice is, but I have even experiences this change-without-notification with United on a few occasions.

 

[Ken555]

Airlines are notorious for poor communications, other than their marketing. The unfortunate reality is that it's up to us to monitor our flights for changes and simply not expect them to notify us proactively.

 

[dougp26364]

"bad communication" includes NOT notifying customers. I am unsure how widespread this practice is, but I have even experiences this change-without-notification with United on a few occasions.

All airlines are guilty of this. For us the worst has been Delta and USAirways but, we've had it happen so frequently on every carrier that I'm in the habit of checking our reservations every few weeks.

I recently caught United changing a flight to from ICT to DEN to HNL over to ICT to ORD to DEN to HNL. I had to fight them a little bit to get them to change it back to our original routing. What triggered the change was the cancelation of one flight and, rather than keeping our routing the same, they tried to keep our departure time the same.

Last month our Frontier flight went from a 1:30 departure to a 4:00 departure and then back to a 1:30 depature.

Our last flight with Delta originally had a 1 hour layover, that change 4 or 5 times until we ended up with a >5 hour layover, which we missed because Delta had flights backed up that far on that particular day.

 

[amycurl]

This is old, but still good, and this conversation reminded me of it:
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/what-else-can-airlines-charge-us#.Tml3gFTGpsY.facebook


The last line sums it up:
"We know you have a lot of choices when flying, and they're all bad, so shut up."