The downside of automatic airline rebookings
As airlines cut their schedules this fall, more passengers will experience the ups and downs — mostly the downs, actually — of their automatic rebooking programs.
When a flight was rescheduled, airlines used to rebook passengers manually. Now they’ve given the job to a computer.
Sometimes the process goes smoothly, sometimes not. The computer often comes up with ridiculous layovers — either way too long, or way too short.
Jeff Stone is discovering just how far these computers can take you into the twilight zone. My client was booked on a San Francisco Paris business class ticket in September on United Airlines. His wife, using frequent flier miles, is on a separate reservation. Since United has no nonstop to Paris, we booked - in June - the outbound flight via Chicago, the return via Washington.
Now the fun begins.
United has had some small 10- to 20-minute schedule changes since we booked, no cancellations this time, and nothing that really affects the connections. Plus none of these flights are full. But last month, the computer switched his late September flight from Paris-DC-San Francisco to Paris-Chicago-Sacramento-San Francisco.
(For those who aren’t regular fliers, United has 10 nonstop flights a day between Chicago and San Francisco. And Sacramento is 86 miles from San Francisco, with only little commuter planes.)
We sorted the tickets out, and put them back through Washington on the return. Now, this weekend, United put in another small schedule change: 20 minutes longer in Washington on the return. And no, they didn’t change his flights back through Sacramento. This time, the computer routed him Paris-Chicago-Las Vegas-San Francisco.
Once again, we humans have stepped in to reinstate the original booking.
But the time and work by me, my client, and the United reservations agents who have had to help us fix this is already exponentially over what it would have taken to adjust the reservations manually in the first place.
The cheerful United agent who Stone talked to said “United should change its Web site to “Pardon our Dust - Under Construction” as they redo their schedule.”
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6 Responses to “The downside of automatic airline rebookings”
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At least the computer is giving you connections that are possible, even if they don’t make sense. Delta’s computer is notorious for giving people schedules with connecting flights that depart before their first flight lands.
Another Delta favorite is to give international passengers less than an hour to clear customs and do the “claim bags” then “recheck bags” game in ATL.
When I called about one of those, the customer no-service agent told me, “It’s a legal connection.” I explained the problem with it and she was still, “The computer says its legal.”
It took five phone calls to fix that one.
I was booked Fort Wayne-Cleveland-Houston but when bad weather hit and the flights were cancelled, the computer rebooked me to the following day for Fort Wayne-Cleveland-Atlanta-Houston. I made the delayed flight from Fort Wayne to Cleveland and checked the customer service desk to see if I would still make my Atlanta flight. I was told that since it was delayed, I could still make it. I then asked if my connection to Houston was still ok. She said “No. That flight was cancelled this morning - there is no flight from Atlanta to Houston this late.” I could have been told that when I checked my bags in Fort Wayne. The ticket agent was having trouble printing my boarding passes - now I know why - there was no flight to board! All turned out well due to good human intervention, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
The Delta stories remind me of British Airways last year when the hand baggage/security situation made Heathrow a worse mess than normal. British Airways added 15 minutes to their minimum “legal connecting time” - depending on what terminals you were using. For new bookings. But when if I called to change an old booking with a shorter connecting time they told me, “No, bookings made before June 30 are legal with shorter connections. I guess people with old tickets were supposed to run faster?
Around the year 2000 I had a trip on Northwest from San Jose to Indianapolis via Minneapolis. A schedule change resulted in a rebooking that had me on a connecting flight that departed 45 minutes BEFORE my originating flight was scheduled to arrive.
I called Northwest and told the agent that I thought I’d have trouble making that connection. She agreed that it might be “a little too close for comfort” and fixed my reservation.
Another followup. Beware especially when you have an upgraded ticket or a ticket booked in a discount business class. The computer has an especially hard time recognizing that, and will search for the same class of service on a different flight. So today, for example, a client of mine was booked into first class using an upgrade, the airline changed the plane to a three class cabin with first, business and coach class, and then, since he wasn’t eligible for first class on a three class plane, changed his SF-Dulles flight to San Francisco-Philadelphia-Dulles. With a two hour layover before a 30 minute flight from Philly to DC.
Again, fixable by humans, but it took a while.