Since 2020, airlines have constantly been adjusting schedules to meet fluctuating demand. Sudden interest in locations open to visitors, combined with not bringing back staff quickly enough, has led to a never before seen number of flights being changed.
I read numerous stories about how an airline changed flight times from morning to evening departure and even some cases of switching from a day flight to red-eye. The current advice I’ve heard is that if you’re not booking within a month of your trip, plan on having your flights changed.
We aren’t flying often yet and were lucky with our positioning flights to New York on Delta in that we only had a slight change. Knowing about the schedule change problems, I built in plenty of time just in case.
I guess our luck with Delta flights has run out.
I recently received an email from Delta telling me that our flight to Hawaii has changed:
- Previous flight from MCO-LAX-LIH
- Depart MCO 11:25 am – 1:34 pm, leave LAX 2:55 pm – 6:55 pm
- Approx 90 min layover
Our new flights are exactly what I didn’t want:
- Depart MCO – 7:00 am – 9:40 am, leave LAX 1:29 pm – 5:38 pm
- Approx 4 hour layover
One reason I booked with Delta was that the flight times were better than the ones offered by Alaska, Southwest, and United. The new flight times present several problems:
- Early departure means we can’t take our dog to camp that morning and will need to drop her off the night before
- We didn’t want to start our vacation by waking up at 4 am
- Arriving at LAX, we’re going to have to find something to do for four hours and there are currently no Priority Pass lounges open
The main positive is that we’ll be arriving in Hawaii 90 minutes earlier. You gotta try to find some bright side, right?
The kicker is that this is the only option. Delta has no other way for me to get from point A to point B. I could cancel my ticket but then I’ll have a bunch of SkyMiles in my account that I’ll need to find a use for and no other airline has anything better. The only thing I can think of to make this less miserable is to find a way to get SkyClub access, which will at least give us a more comfortable chair and power outlets while we wait.
I could hope that Delta will change our flights to times closer to our original itinerary sometime between now and our trip. Until then, we wait.
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