Tyler and I have had airlines change our flights on various occasions, like when we were planning our 2020 anniversary trip and when we were going to South America for three weeks. While we often go along with the updated flight itinerary, it can be super annoying when these flight changes add to your travel time or otherwise make things more inconvenient – like that 1AM flight on New Year’s Day they rescheduled us to take home from Peru, or the layover added to the direct flights we purchased to and from Fortaleza, Brazil.
Most recently, we have been in the process of booking our 2021 anniversary trip to San Francisco, California! While I’ve been to SF for quick work trips, this trip will give us some time to really explore the city, and hopefully take a day trip out to Napa and/or Sonoma. We got our childcare squared away, and we’ve been doing quite a bit of research on what to do in the area, like Petaluma and Point Reyes (Megan’s area of expertise).
Of course, our research and trip almost came to a halt when I got the email two weeks ago that the airline had changed our flights. Every single leg of our trip had changed, and we lost several hours in San Francisco – while gaining several hours on a layover in LAX.
We had to decide what to do, figuring we had three options to choose from:
- Go with the updated flight itinerary. We really didn’t want to take these new flights, especially as we had to coordinate childcare for this trip, but we have certainly gone this route in the past. If you’re a little more flexible with your travel or don’t want to deal with more research, this is certainly the easiest option.
- Request a refund. When an airline has changed our itinerary significantly, we’ve often used that opportunity to cancel the flights and get a refund. We actually took advantage of this last year when we were planning to go to Seattle and Portland, getting refunds for our initial flights and then rebooking much cheaper flights. This can definitely save you money, but requires finding new flights – assuming you still want to go on your trip.
- Request new flights. I hadn’t done this before, but since we had used a flight credit for the San Francisco flights (from the rebooked Seattle and Portland flights, considering we ended up going to Savannah instead), I didn’t want to deal with using it again or potentially getting more credit for the flight. So I called up the airline and asked if they could move us to new flights, since they had changed ours. And they did!
Option 3 ended up working really well for us! I found new flights on Google Flights’ Explore Tool by filtering to the airline to see their options specifically. When I spoke with the airline agent, I requested these flights specifically because they were closer to our original itinerary. The locations of our layovers changed, and we still do get in a little later than originally planned, but we are much happier to not be spending so much time sitting in the airport – especially after a 6AM flight! I would definitely explore this option for any future flight changes.
And with that, our SF trip is still on the books! We’re very excited to get on a plane for the first time in over a year and explore the other side of the country. 🙂