Frequent Miler on the Air - Do we book speculatively, hoping for a schedule change? | Question of the Week Ep8 | 7-5-26

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

Do we book speculatively, hoping for a schedule change? Reader "LR" sent us the following question:"I was intrigued by a recent post about schedule changes in another group that I follow. This particular person noted that anytime United or AA makes a schedule change of any type, you can change your flight at no additional cost to your preferred route. Sometimes you may even have flexibility within several days of the original flight. So my question is, is this a tactic that you all use if you book flights far in advance? Pick the cheapest award price from one city to another, and then hope for a schedule change in order to change it to your preferred route? And then on an even more complicated note- have any of you had success following a schedule change, of changing from a flight in “first class (non-lay-flat seats)” to a different flight on “Delta One” or AA’s “flagship business” or United Polaris (etc, all of which have lay-flat seats)? I assume these are considered different classes and would require a fee upgrade. I’m trying to book flights home from Hawaii next March, and I’m wondering if this kind of tactic may work."We’ve been answering a reader or listener question at the end of each Frequent Miler on the Air podcast episode. Now, we’ve turned the question of the week into its own weekly episode. Tune in every Sunday at 5pm for our Question of the Week podcast. And if you have your own question you’d like to submit, you can send it to [e-mail] in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. This week's question of the week. Do we book speculatively hoping for a schedule change? So LR writes in and says, I was intrigued by a recent post about schedule changes in another group I follow. This particular person noted that anytime United or American Airlines make a schedule change of any type, you can change your flight at no additional cost to your preferred route.

Sometimes you may even have flexibility within several days of the original flight. So my question is, is this a tactic that you all use if you book flights far in advance? Pick the cheapest award price from one city to another, then hope for a schedule change in order to change it to your preferred route. So let's talk about that. Do you do that, Greg? I don't do it purposefully, but I've actually considered many times. I've thought about this is something I really ought to do.

Because what happens is you could book, as the person who wrote in mentioned, you could book a good award price to wherever you want to go. And if you don't like the route that it's on, you know, when you book like way in advance, schedule changes are really likely to have. happen between the time you book and when the flight actually happens, even if they're minor. And sometimes, even with really minor schedule changes, some airlines will let you make almost any kind of change. And that means, you know, things like moving from a multi-stop itinerary to a non-stop or in some cases even change the origin or destination airports. That's a little more rare, but does sometimes happen. And so the idea is like, you know,

you found this incredible award flight, but the routing isn't good. It's really inconvenient for whatever reason. Just book it anyway. And especially, you know, this person mentioned American Airlines and United, both of them allow free award changes and cancellations. So you can just book it and then hope for a schedule change

and then you call the airline and say, hey, that schedule change doesn't work for me. And, you know, could you instead put me on this other? There's that direct flight that I want. And I did that once. Again, it wasn't purposeful, but I had booked a award flight to New Zealand. And there was a big schedule change. And I was able to fly. I was able to change to a flight to Auckland instead of the original booking,

which was multi-stop to Wellington, and the Auckland was what I really wanted. And so, you know, you can do that, as long as there's that schedule change, you could do that even though there's no award availability on the flight you actually want. Yeah, and, you know, important there is that that'll usually be the case, usually just on flights operated by the ticketing carrier, that it won't matter if there's award availability or not. Usually they can't force availability on partner airlines. Though, I mean, there have been some exceptions. We've heard from readers from time to time. We've been able to get a seat on a different airline even. But yeah, like you, this is something I don't do intentionally.

But it really could be a useful technique. I mean, I'm a frequent Southwest flyer. And Southwest, when they make a schedule change, I think they usually give you something like 14 days of flexibility. It's like maybe it's not 14. It's something ridiculous like that, though. It's not just one or two days. You get quite a range of days you can change to and change to other flight times and, you know, more direct routings or whatever for for no additional fees. So, so I think it probably is a useful tactic to employ. That said, I don't actively use this. Now, I'm going to talk about why I don't in a second. But before I do, I will say that Greg mentioned calling to get the flight you want. But sometimes you could just pick it in, you know, the app.

The airline apps are often better. I've found with stuff like this than the website and faster than calling and talking to someone. So a lot of times you'd be able to pick things there. Now, obviously the thing you want might not be there. But you do need to know what you want, what the airline offers before you even call. You know, what, what are the options? What's the ideal thing that you want?

I think it helps to know that ahead of time. So you've got to look at the different routings that are for sale even. So, all right, that thing, that's one. thing. Another related thing is sometimes this can really work in your favor. This happened to me recently. I had a flight booked from Nashville to Albany, Nashville, Tennessee to Albany, New York, and Southwest had some incredible sale where, like, for 30 or 40 minutes, flights were like a thousand points each way. And so I booked a very indirect routing. It was like Nashville to Orlando to Albany. And Southwest must have had a schedule change because I woke up to an email a few days ago

that said, oh, your flight's been canceled. They put me on the nonstop, Nashville to Albany instead. So, I mean, that's a perfect example of, wow, I wasn't intending. This wasn't intentional. I didn't book it expecting that kind of a change. But hey, great that it worked out. And, you know, so if you have access to same-day flight changes, that can be another way you can sort of employ this technique, not a schedule change necessarily. But I know that both of us have booked unideal things multiple times before with airlines with which we can get a free same-day change. Now, sometimes that's a feature of elite status or with Southwerex.

If you book a choice fair or higher, you can change for free on the day of departure. And there have been plenty of times where I have booked the unideal option expecting to change on the day of departure. And I've done that successfully a number of times. Yeah. But why don't I speculatively book more of these far in advance hoping to change later? Really, for me, I think the biggest thing is the mental bandwidth to keep track of everything that I have booked and when it all needs to get changed or, you know, especially if I'm booking

trips that I'm not even like very mentally invested in yet. It's a lot of stuff to juggle if you start doing this for a lot of different trips. And I do use Tripit to keep track of my flights. But even then, I use that app to keep track of stuff. And just the other day, I canceled a bunch of stuff. And there was luckily just a restaurant reservation that I had forgotten about. And I got a notification from Google 10 minutes beforehand that reminded me. And I said, I canceled a bunch of other stuff. I forgot about that reservation. And it wasn't a big deal because it was just a restaurant reservation, but it would be a bigger deal if that were a flight, and I didn't see the notification until too late, and I couldn't get my points back. So I'm lukewarm on speculative

bookings because we do book a lot of trips, and so I've constantly got a lot of trips on mind, and I don't really want to add to that. But I can totally see this being a good technique. Really great point. A couple of things about doing this, if you are interested in doing it, is I'm not an expert on this by far, so I don't know what the rules are, but I do, I'm sort of vaguely aware that different airlines have different rules about how big of a schedule change matters enough to allow a free change of routing. And so, you know, you might have to, the schedule change might have to be like an hour or might have to cause too tight of a connection to be viable, something along those lines for it to work. It also might vary based on, you know, some airlines might not

have that really hard-coded. It might depend on who you talk to. It might depend on your elite status, things like that. So just something to keep in mind that if a, if the schedule changes by a few minutes, that might not help you, but I can't tell you for sure. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmyler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question

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