inFLIGHTout Travel Tip: Know Alternative Flight Options

You trot on down to the airport two hours before departure, check-in, dance your way through security, and gracefully arrive at the gate in preparation for boarding. Just then you realize the flight has been cancelled. Gut reaction for you and the gate agent is to rebook everyone on the next available flight. What if it's the last flight out? What if later flights are booked to capacity? What do you do if there are 200 people from your flight already in line waiting to get rebooked on another carrier? Here is a solution that has worked for me quite well in the past:

Know alternative flight options. It's an exercise I perform each time I arrive at the airport. If I'm flying from say Chicago to San Francisco, a quick glance at the Departures board shows my flight is running 30 minutes late. Elsewhere on the board, I see a flight to Oakland on-time, leaving 10 minutes later than mine. This cues me in to a potential alternative should my original flight go severely delayed or cancelled. So if the San Francisco flight gets pulled, most passengers will be scrambling for the next flights to SFO leaving the next day, while a few wiser folks opt for Oakland and likely fly out that same evening. Know your alternatives!

inFLIGHTout Travel Tip: Program Airline Phone Numbers

What's worse than showing up at the airport and finding out your flight has been cancelled? Realizing you will be competing with up to 200 other people from your flight trying to get rebooked as well. Everyone has a story: "We're on our honeymoon," "I have a business meeting to attend," "I have elite status," and the list goes on. At the customer service center in the airport, everyone lines up in proper form, hoping for the best - expecting the worst, to find out whether they will even fly out today.

The key here is to have your situation looked at before the others. Call it selfish, if you must. But there are a limited number of seats and trying accommodate a full plane of customers from a cancelled flight onto later flights can be a challenge. Here is what you can do to improve your chances of of a desirable outcome:

Program airline phone numbers in your mobile phone. (Go ahead and do this now, I'll wait). This way while you are standing in line at the customer service/rebooking center, you can concurrently call the airline. By the time you hang up the phone, many of your fellow passengers may still be in line awaiting their fate.

Reader Question: How Full Will The Flight Be?

Question: "...My flight is next week and I want to know whether the flight will be full, or if I might get an empty middle seat. How can I tell?"

Answer: Thanks for the email. Actually your question has two parts. Let's first tackle the empty middle seat question. Based on your writing, I'm assuming you are flying a plane that includes a configuration of 3 seats in a row, and you are hoping for an empty middle one. Aren't we all! =) It's impossible to determine whether you will have an empty middle seat because seat changes can occur at any time, including at the gate. Not until the boarding door closes can you be certain to score an empty seat next to you.

If you are curious about how full the flight is overall, which can sometimes give you an educated guess whether middle seats will be occupied, there are a couple ideas:

First, check the airline seatmaps. Many airlines allow you to pull up your reservation on their website, then modify your seat assignment. Here you can get a general idea of how full the plane might be.

Some cautions though. Some people have confirmed reservations but no seats assigned yet. The airline may block certain seats because they are carrying extra cargo and don't want to fill every seat with passengers (weight restrictions). The airline may also block seats for security reasons, for high-status passengers, or for airport check-in only. All that taken into consideration, it may be tough for an accurate appraisal of how full the flight will be simply by looking at the seatmaps.

Second, check the class availability of your flight. This will give you an idea of how many tickets the airline is still selling (and their respective fare class). Many cheap seats still available could be a sign the flight is not full. Reversely, if you see the flight is nearly sold out, then expect a cramped flight (or perhaps lots of cargo).

In summary, using both the strategies above could help in determining the flight load, but factoring in variables such as last minute flight cancellations, displaced passengers/crew and stand-by customers, a simple guess might be just as accurate.