Help with Airlines that change your reservation...

[ctc917]

I am looking to maybe switch from our regular airline, Southwest, to another one like Delta, Airtran, Jetblue, United that might have cheaper flights and I was looking to stay away from airlines that seem to change your reservation times and days before your trip.

Anyone have alot of issues with one airline more than other.

Thanks

ctc917

 

[Horace Horsecollar]

I am looking to maybe switch from our regular airline, Southwest, to another one like Delta, Airtran, Jetblue, United that might have cheaper flights and I was looking to stay away from airlines that seem to change your reservation times and days before your trip.

Anyone have alot of issues with one airline more than other.

Any of the airlines that let you book up to 330 days before travel tend to adjust their schedule over time. That can mean something as minor as replacing one kind of aircraft with another, changing the flight number, or adjusting the schedule by a few minutes. It can also be something larger, such as changing the flight time by several hours, removing one flight from the schedule for a city pair with several flights per day, or even removing a city pair entirely.

If you book 10 months out, one or two changes are likely. If you book 2 months out, the schedule is usually pretty firm.

Back when Delta was absorbing Northwest and when United was absorbing Continental, schedule changes seemed to be much more frequent for those four airlines. Now that those mergers are behind us, the schedule changes are more likely to involve just fine-tuning, not massive changes.

 

[Gina-Gina-Bo-Bina]

I am looking to maybe switch from our regular airline, Southwest, to another one like Delta, Airtran, Jetblue, United that might have cheaper flights and I was looking to stay away from airlines that seem to change your reservation times and days before your trip.

Anyone have alot of issues with one airline more than other.

Thanks

ctc917

Jetblue has changed our itinerary on virtually every leg of our travels. Sometimes the change is by as little as 10 minutes or as much as an hour. Except in one instance (where our 8 am morning flight was pushed back to early afternoon....a benefit to us ) it has been nothing major ... but definitely some "tweaking" before the times were finalized.

That said, they have been great at keeping us updated with plenty of notice, so it hasn't been an imposition. The biggest "problem" it has caused is the necessity to adjust the pickup or drop off time for our rental vehicle.

When we book with Jetblue now, we simply expect that there will be minor time variations by the time our travel date(s) roll around.