In this post we share travel advice including monitoring any flight changes/cancellations and recommend pre-allocating your seats (even if you have to pay the airline a fee) and checking in online as soon as it opens. This advice is particularly important if you are travelling during peak holiday periods!
Flight Schedule Changes and Cancellations
As a Travel Agent flight cancellation and schedule changes are the absolute bane of our life as they create so much extra work for us, and of course it is frustrating for our clients too as it may mean they have to travel a day earlier or come back a day later, which isn’t always possible when you work full time… and of course we must amend the hotel, car hire and transfer arrangements too.
Or it could be a time change, or even an airport change…
‘We had booked an amazing trip for a client who organised her own flights only to find that when she turned up at Heathrow her flight had been switched to Gatwick (weeks earlier) and the online travel company she’d booked the flight with had failed to inform her. She missed her flight and had to buy another ticket leaving her hundreds of pounds out-of-pocket, and late for the start of her rail tour’.
Therefore our FIRST piece of advice is to check and double-check your flight status DIRECTLY with the airline – you will need a specific reference (PNR see explanation below!) to do this which should be on your paperwork. It’s also important that you register your contact details with the airline to ensure YOU receive immediate updates on any last-minute changes… and of course make sure you’ve got that mobile phone with you!
What is a PNR?
It is short for ‘Passenger Name Record’ and it is a reference that allows passengers to manage their booking or check-in online. The reference is 6 alphanumeric characters (letters and numbers are used together) and you’ll almost always see the reference displayed in capital letters.
Allocating your Seats & Online Check-in
If you want to sit together on the flight and you have not already pre-allocated your seats you need to do this as soon as possible (if you’ve booked your holiday with a deposit you will have to wait until you’ve paid in full and the flight is ticketed). In most cases you will have to pay to pre-allocate your seats. This is another ‘hidden’ expense but we suggest that you factor this in to the overall spend/budget for the holiday.
If you haven’t allocated seats and you go in to your booking online and there is nothing showing as available, make sure you check-in online as soon as it opens as further seats often show at this time.
‘We had a couple on their honeymoon who had been advised by ‘someone in the know’ that if they didn’t pre-allocate a seat or check-in online, they’d have a good chance of being upgraded to business class as the premium economy cabin they were booked was showing as full. They ended up in economy… yes, they did get a refund (eventually!) but it wasn’t the best start to their honeymoon.’
Our SECOND piece of advice is to pre-allocate your seats and checked in online and our THIRD piece of advice….
If you do pre-allocate your seats watch out for aircraft and schedule changes, as in some cases you’ll be moved to the same seats on the new aircraft (happy days!), but quite often you’ll be moved to seats you don’t want as the cabin layout is different, or you won’t have been re-allocated seats at all…
If you would like to take the stress out of travel book a slot in Gilly’s diary to start planning your next holiday, click here to find available times.