Good advice about ‘Feeding and Watering’ your flight reservations applies this weekend. It appears that AA has loaded a large number of flight changes, with some routes being terminated or re-timed.
You can check your AA flights on aa.com by entering your reservation reference and your name.
My experience so far, is that some flight times have changed, by as much as an hour; flight times to and from LA have been extended (presumably to handle the delays that seem common at LAX), and other segments have had their times from 6 months ago reinstated.
So, if you have a booking, take a moment to make sure there are no nasty surprises.
AA tends to do odd things when it changes flight times. If you are looking at earning maximum BA Tier Points, watch out for route changes. AA thinks nothing of changing a LHR-JFK-LAX to a LHR-DFW-LAX which drops the number of Tiers points significantly. In addition, if a change drops your flight below the legal minimum connecting time, they often just drop off a segment, so you need to check that all segments continue in to exist in any bookings you have.
Last month AA erased one of my trips to HKG. All the segments disappeared (there were many). I called and they had to rebuild it. Of course, I lost all my seat assignments. That hurts on a high demand flight such as DFW-HKG.
AA is a bunch of idiots when it comes to schedule changes. They screw everybody over with the seat assignments and they have incompetent reps and supervisors. I had a supervisor (after losing my MCE aisle seat for regular coach DFW-HKG) tell me that a middle seat was an aisle seat. After her telling me several times it was an aisle seat I had to ask if she had ever been on the plane. She said no…so I had to inform said supervisor that I had flown on that plane at least a dozen times and I know what the seats are. She just said “well, I’m not showing that”. Completely clueless.
I noticed a few days ago that our F class reservation (JFK-EZE, booked with miles) was changed to J (aircraft swap, no F in the new configuration). Haven’t had a chance to call AA yet, but hoping they will credit us the extra miles we paid for F back, in pre-deval rates (we are happy with J, just don’t want to overpay).
Thanks for the heads up! They screwed up my reservation from SAN-MAD and I caught it right away thanks to you. They decided It would be fine for me to leave 5 hours earlier (at 6 am) and have a 5 hour layover without mentioning anything. They suck, but luckily I was able to get it somewhat taken care of.
IKC – you can get reimbursed at pre-deval rates, but be prepared to talk them through it. Took me a few phone calls.
@Ryan – glad you got it sorted
Amazing how one can bash an airline without knowing reasons behind seat changes and drop segments.I give that person one day or better yet one week working for a major airline , they will never complain again. They will even praise airline employees for doing what they do.