3 potential problems with early holiday travel bookings

Much is made this time of year of the dangers of procrastinating in booking holiday travel. Admittedly, it’s definitely easier and almost always cheaper to start early. But that doesn’t mean early bookers avoid all reservation issues.

Schedule changes
The first and biggest potential problem comes from schedule changes. Unfortunately, with airlines constantly tweaking their schedules, the odds are good that a flight booked several months in advance might operate at a slightly different time than it was booked.

Normally this isn’t a big deal. But in the chase of connecting flights, it might not take that much to result in a new schedule that is a misconnection. (Not enough time according to the airline rules to make the connection.)

It can be worse, one family I had flying from Florida to Vancouver on December 21 had their outbound flight to Toronto changed by 1 1/2 hours. Fortunately, as it turned out there was a later flight with seats available so we could make the change to their connection.

In this case, Air Canada simply sent the new flight with no automatic rebooking and no warning that the new one-hour connection wasn’t enough time to transfer from an international to a domestic flight. (Something a traveler who booked direct and was unfamiliar with Toronto International Airport might easily miss.)

Even with nonstop flights, schedule changes can be an issue. If the plane is leaving earlier, even 10-15 minutes around the holidays could present a problem.

In theory, airlines send schedule change messages, but they can easily be overlooked or go into spam. Travel agents, including online agencies, should inform their clients. Still people forget. (I’ve had the “thanks for letting me know” turn into “it completely slipped my mind.”)

Seat assignments
This problem often goes along with schedule changes. Or, sometimes the airline just changes aircraft for a given flights.

So far this year, United and American have been the worse culprits in our office, but other airlines can do the same thing. (Delta’s merger with Northwest caused a lot of problems last year.)

So far this year, I’ve had several people lose seats entirely, and a party of four end up moved to the back of a plane, when they initially had good seats further forward.

In fact, with my own family’s reservation, United simply changed planes and eliminated the seat assignments, for the day after Christmas.

In our case, I got the message just a few hours after the change, and there were no seats left together. With the clients who were moved to the back, despite their booking in March, I was told, sorry, they’ll have to ask at the airport.

If travelers find this out at the airport, they’re probably looking at scattered middle seats. Or hearing the dreaded phrase “please wait in the boarding area for your seat assignment.” (Guaranteed reservations mean they have to find something, or compensate you, but around the holidays that can be small consolation, especially since late boarding usually means no overhead room.)

Change in rates (could be good)
The third issue can be more positive, but usually only has a chance of working if you aren’t going to a traditional beach or warm weather destination. It’s simply verifying the current rates for any cars or hotels you might have booked.

In general, rates go up around the holidays, but sometimes if demand hasn’t been as high as anticipated, suppliers have been known to discount. Rarely, even in the more popular destinations.

So if you do have your reservations happily booked in advance, the best advice is just, at some point this fall, double-check these three details — seats, schedule, rates. If there’s a problem, you’ll have time to try to fix it, and who knows, you might even save some cash for holiday shopping.

Photo by Kossy@FINEDAYS