This morning’s email brought news from Delta that they were changing their schedules and our flight home from Boston (via Atlanta) was one of the victims. They booked us on the next available flight using the same itinerary, which would have gotten us home about 10pm Pacific – much later than we wanted.
I was steeling myself to call them and beg them to let us switch to an earlier flight even though it would cost more miles but decided to see what I could do with self-service. When I clicked on the “Change Flight” button, I was shocked – every flight from Boston to San Jose was available at no additional cost, even the ones with “Delta One” service (lie-flat beds!) which would normally have cost three times as many miles as we’d paid for our original flight. Sadly, the “Delta One” flights weren’t at convenient times, but we were able to book a nice flight through Seattle that will get us home around 8pm Pacific – and I didn’t have to wait on hold at all.
You were luckier than us. We had a great roundtrip MCO-SEA-FAI booked for 10K Skymiles per person (Basic Economy) arriving in FAI at 6:36 PM. Then the morning MCO-SEA nonstop was removed from the schedule and the computer rebooked us on the evening nonstop to SEA to eventually arrive FAI 1:40 AM the next day. Since the tickets were Basic Economy, I had no chance of changing them online (I checked). So today I called. Rather than wait on hold, I was promised a call back in…more than 9 hours. They did in fact call back as promised, so now our outbound flight MCO-MSP-FAI arrives FAI at 9:13 PM. Not ideal, but clearly better than 1:40 AM the next day.
Avoiding Basic Economy has advantages, I guess. I’m glad for your sake they didn’t make you wait on hold for the entire 9 hours!
I certainly would have paid the extra 2K per ticket for Main Cabin that I first saw, but it had jumped to an extra 7K per ticket by the time I got around to booking. The 10K round trip was so low, I had decided that I wouldn’t be unhappy with throwing away the tickets if we decided not to take the trip.