I was going through email and saw one from Flying Blue. Since it was most likely regarding our upcoming award reservation, I read it right away. The first line wasn’t what I wanted to see.
I would like to inform you of the cancellation of your flights.
At first, I was worried it was regarding the confusion when booking and the eventual help from a Flying Blue agent needed to issue the tickets for flights. I was relieved when I continued reading:
I have already rebooked your flights for you. For more details about your reservation ******, please go to ‘My reservations’ on airfrance.com. Also, we have sent ticket separately.
We had booked flights from FRA-DTW-MCO in Delta One. Not my preferred routing but it was the only thing available with miles. It turns out Delta has canceled the FRA-DTW flight.
The strange thing is that they only removed the flight from the schedule for 19 days, From December 20th to January 7th.
The only thing I can imagine is that the flight is typically full of business travelers who will not be flying over the holidays so the route will not be profitable over those days.
Now I’ve heard of flights being seasonal or only flying on certain days but I’ve never seen a flight disappear from the schedule for such a short period of time.
This story does have a silver lining because Flying Blue has rebooked us onto Delta flights from FRA-JFK-MCO which leaves at the same time but arrives home 90 minutes earlier. This flight wasn’t available with miles when I booked (and still isn’t.)
However, I’m not crazy about flying into JFK in the winter. The thing I’m wondering is if I should try to get them to change us to the FRA-ATL-MCO flight since there’s less chance of bad weather (snow) in Atlanta and there are way more flights from ATL-MCO than from JFK in case we’re delayed. I have no other reason to justify the change because both flights arrive at the same time with the Atlanta flight leaving Frankfurt 1 hour later and having an hour shorter connection than the JFK option. Both flights are on a Delta 767 so no difference in the hard product.
Final Thoughts
Flight cancelations can wreak havoc on a carefully planned itinerary. They can cause missed connections on separate reservations with no reasonable alternatives available. This is even a bigger problem when dealing with award tickets and adding in the fact that this ticket was for a flight on an alliance partner only makes things more difficult.
The fact that we were moved to a flight which I would have preferred to book if it was available is a nice surprise. That’s why I’m hesitant to try to mess with it and try to change the connection to Atlanta instead of New York. Would I be pushing my luck or should I take the position that Delta is the one who canceled the flight so I can ask for which flights I want to replace it?
What would you do?
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
2 comments
That’s nothing. I (and I’m not the first person to have this happen) had a carefully planned award on AA leaving on Thanksgiving day. MCI-PHL-AMS and same return. A unicorn miracle in business class that I found in June on AA metal. It got changed once in about July to reroute us through ORD but I assume the 737 max issue was the issue. Then it got changed again. AA dropped their flight from PHL-AMS for like 3 or 4 days during that week and then it resumes. That would have been bad enough but AA fixed it by just dropping that segment off and leaving it with no email etc. When I checked it we had MCI-ORD-PHL and then AMS-PHL-MCI. The reservation agent was perplexed but I’ve since seen other have similar issues on AA recently. Luckily we got it booked through LHR partly on BA with AA eating the fees.
Even if both segments have international equipment, I like your idea of asking for connecting in ATL better because it is less likely to suffer from weather delays, gives more uninterrupted time (and thus a better chance to take a nap), and more time with international service which is generally better than domestic.