We have been traveling for quite a few years and airfare has substantially changed over that timeframe. I don’t really remember how airfare worked long ago when I was going on ski trip vacations. During most of those trips, you had to use a travel agent to do almost everything, and it was a pain. There was no internet and no online reservation systems, but it seemed like flights were more stable in pricing, they did not fluctuate daily, and were not based so much on demand as they are today. But, since we couldn’t readily look like we can today, maybe we just never really knew if anything changed or not. We paid a Travel Agent and they issued us paper tickets, pretty simple.
Then came the widespread changes in how airfare was priced using dynamic models. The worst addition was the introduction of the “change fee” if you wanted to change your flights. Well maybe that was not the worst, in my opinion, baggage fees are still the worst and still exist. However, thanks to Covid, most airlines had to eliminate change fees because of the uncertainty of travel during the pandemic. Maybe that was one of the only benefits that came from Covid, not sure I can think of anything else positive as a result of COVID-19.
Thankfully, in today’s arena of airfare purchases, most airlines offer you the opportunity to make changes without a fee, only adding charges if there is a change in the airfare as compared to the original flight cost. On the flip side, airlines are also issuing credits if the change in flights results in a lower fare, which is nice.
The reason for the history lesson is that I am still so used to the pre-Covid system, once you selected flights, you were basically stuck with them unless you wanted to pay the change fee, generally $100.00 per ticket for domestic flights and $250 for international flights. Sometimes the airfare decreased enough to cover these change fees, but more than likely, it did not, and so you were stuck with your original airfare if pricing went down.
For our flights to Iceland, we monitored the flight costs over about three months and bought our tickets when we thought the pricing was about as low as it might get. Unfortunately, to get decent airfare and connections at that time, we had to purchase flights leaving and returning to the Charlotte Airport, an easy drive of about 1 hour 45 minutes from home. Flights out of our home airport in South Carolina were significantly higher, enough to offset the cost of renting cars to drive to and from home to there. Some of the cost savings for the rental cars were offset by not having to pay for parking at Charlotte, or at our airport near home
On a whim, I decided this morning to check to see what the airfare might be from our home airport to Iceland and back instead of Charlotte, mainly just to educate myself on any airfare changes for future travels. I was initially going to see what round trip airfare was from home to Charlotte to see if it was less or comparable to our rental car costs to drive to and from Charlotte. But, I decided instead to go to our flights after logging in to Delta.com and see what the airfare costs would be to change our existing flights.
I was somewhat under the incorrect impression that if we wanted to make changes to our existing flights, they had to be from and to the same original ticket airports. Again, I was wrong. When I went to the Delta webpage to change the flights, I was allowed to change the Charlotte Airport to our home airport and a list of flights appeared. I could even see flights that utilized our existing Iceland connections for our current tickets so we would be arriving and departing at the same time as before.
I selected flights with decent layovers in Atlanta, which was our connecting airport and then the rest if the connections were to get us to the same departure and arrival airports as our original flight segments to Iceland, in this case, JFK for going there and DTW (Detroit) for our return. The bonus of all of this was that when I made these selections, the flights now resulted in an eCredit from Delta. Wow, we could now leave and return to South Carolina, essentially at the same time as we would have had to leave to drive to Charlotte and back, and save money. It was just such a foreign concept, like I said, I was still stuck in the old paradigm, changes were just not something to consider, much less for a credit.
I discussed the changes with Stephanie as she was getting ready for work, and we both agreed, why not, it was better and cheaper than the hassle of driving to and from Charlotte, especially on our departing flight, where we had to consider rush hour traffic getting to the airport for our flight leaving at 7:40 PM. Plus, we did not have to go and get the rental car, which was not bad for the drive to Charlotte, we were renting from a local Enterprise location. However, the return rental had to be dropped off at our home airport, it was cost-prohibitive to use the same local drop-off location for that rental return.
The Delta webpage was great, we had a selection to compare the old flights and the new flights, which helped to confirm we had the correct dates and Iceland connecting flights as before. Then we picked our seats, which again was easy, but a little strange. Even though we had the same flight connections into and out of Iceland, the Delta system only kept our existing seats for one of the flights, the return through Detroit. No problem, we still could pick good seats on the flight from JFK to Iceland, just in a slightly different row for some reason. On that flight, we had specifically picked a set of two seats on the side in a 2x4x2 seating configuration since that is an overnight flight.
Everything was confirmed and I looked once more at the flight comparison to make sure everything was correct. I hit the confirm button and after a bit, for some reason, I got an error message stating I would need to start the process over. Uugghh, maybe I had taken too long. I went to start over, and the pricing I now saw was not the same as before, the changes were more and not a credit. I then realized the flights I was now trying to change were the new flights, and that was why I saw either zero credit or more cost. I don’t know why I received the error message, but the flight changes went through and the updated itinerary was now listing our home airport. Great.
This was a good lesson on understanding what the limitations are now for making changes to existing flights, it is easy and there are no additional fees. It is also nice that you can go through all of the changes and until you confirm, you never lose the original reservations.
Now we have to consider how to get to and from our local airport, maybe we can avoid parking costs, but the cost is not bad, a benefit of having a small airport. Maybe we can get a ride to the airport from a neighbor or friend and just Uber back like we have done before. We are just not Uber-educated enough to rely on making sure we can arrange a ride with enough advance time to make our departing flights.
One last note on the Delta eCredits. We were trying to use some eCredits for another trip we had gotten when we previously made some changes to these Iceland flights before because of a schedule change. There are significant limitations to using eCredits, it appears from some initial research that they are only good for booking new flights, not making seat upgrades or paying for other fees, such as baggage fees, or maybe some drinks on a flight. Of course, they don’t want to make it easy or logical to use them, and they have expiration dates, so thankfully, our credits are not that much, I am not sure we will be able to use them before they expire. We will look into it further just to make sure.
Leave a Reply