"There's been a change in your itinerary" - Why are the flights now longer?
Last month I booked a flight on American Airlines for the end of December. Today I got an email from them stating that there had been a change in my trip, and here are the updated details of my flights.
For both flights (IAD->LAX and LAX->SYD), the only change I can see is that the departure and arrival times have changed slightly (<30 minutes). The aircraft did not change either, but both flights are now longer! The first flight gained 49 minutes and the second flight gained 10 minutes.
10 minutes on a 15 hour flight is negligible, but adding almost an hour to what was a 5.5 hour flight seems like quite a lot! Why would an airline change their flight time so drastically, when seemingly nothing but the departure time has changed?
Best Answer
For any particular flight, you could look it up in FlightAware and see if there’s an annotation for the change. Most probably not. For any particular flight, Rory’s answer is likely correct - that it’s a gate scheduling issue.
However, there’s a general trend in the aviation industry to post longer flight times for the same routes than previously:
Airlines are flying airplanes slower to save fuel. Back when there was competition and we used travel agents, the fastest flights would show first in SABRE and other databases but as airlines monopolize routes and people sort by price and not time, there’s no reason not to slow down to save fuel.
Congestion at airports, cuts to maintenance, number of standby planes and crew, and other operational issue means they need to build in more buffer time for an ontime arrival. No one likes to arrive late while arriving early seems a crowd pleaser.
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Why are flight times getting longer?
The additional time in the air is due to what is known in the aviation industry as \u201cschedule creep,\u201d or \u201cpadding.\u201dWhy is my flight being changed?
Airlines sometimes wait until a couple of months or even weeks before a flight to decide whether to operate it. This can be due to demand, equipment changes or any number of other reasons. For example, recent weather across the country caused Southwest to proactively change, cancel and delay over 45% of its schedule.Is it normal for flight times to change?
When you book a flight, you agree on its schedule. However, all airlines reserve themselves the right to change the time (and sometimes even the date) of the flight, as per their terms and conditions. Specifically, airlines do not guarantee flight times and stress that those are not part of the contract of carriage.Do airlines add more flights as the date gets closer?
Specifically, plane tickets usually don't get cheaper closer to the departure date. Instead, flights tend to be the most inexpensive when you book between four months and three weeks before your departure date. According to the CheapAir.com 2019 Annual Airfare Study, you can expect rates to go up after that period.Radiohead - There, There
More answers regarding "There's been a change in your itinerary" - Why are the flights now longer?
Answer 2
Airlines sometimes make a push to improve their on-time statistics, and this usually includes publishing longer flight times, which will automatically improve the on-time performance for any flight not already running at 100%.
Answer 3
The accepted answer is incorrect. We have slot controls at only a few U.S. airports, and neither LAX nor IAD is one.
The answer is that airlines adjust schedules all the time. That's a big increase but not unprecedented. There are so many interconnected factors at play that it's nearly impossible to get a neat answer.
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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