Fun with airlines

Yesterday morning there was a message in the In box from Orbitz telling us that AirTran had changed our itinerary for our November trip to Orlando and we now had a 28-minute layover in Baltimore instead of a 2.5-hour layover. On the advice on an Internet acquaintance, I checked the AirTran airline to see if our itinerary was available for purchase. If it was, I figured the airline thought that length of layover was do-able.

Not only was the changed itinerary not available, our flight to Baltimore was not listed at all.

So I called AirTran. It turns out the short layover was the least of our worries. AirTran had cancelled our flight to Baltimore and our return flight out of Orlando without bothering to rebook us on any alternate flights. Somehow I doubt they were planning on refunding our money either.

The good news is, we are now booked on alternate flights . . . and we even get to Orlando a few hours earlier. And the reservation agent did not even suggest that we needed to pay more money. The bad news is, our new flight leaves Orlando at 9:45 a.m., instead of 4:00 p.m., so we lose a whole morning to spend in the parks.

I did verify that AirTran now has our email address in their system, so we should be notified of any further changes. We'll see. They have a lot of time to mess things up between now and November.