Rookie Wednesday: Watch your seats EACH Weekend – Because Delta Will NOT!

Welcome to a weekly feature on the Eye of the Flyer blog. Each week this series covers in a “rookie” way either a Delta or travel related theme and attempts to break down to a basic level each topic. You can read up on all the previous posts HERE. Now on to this week’s feature.

There is hardly a Saturday ever that goes by that Delta does not, in some minor or major way, come up with schedule changes that can impact your flights. This can mean some good results for you but there can also be very bad changes as well. Either way sometimes the ONLY notice you will EVER get, when you look at your full list of upcoming trips in your My Delta, is some tiny red time numbers next to your flights. Yep, that’s it!

Now before you go clicking on stuff on Delta.com I hope you will go and read my older posts on schedule changes. I never click – I always call. But sometimes I just leave them “as-is” as I may want to go and mess with them when I have more time. But this week Delta just “fixed” them without telling me or getting my input at all. And guess what happened next…

Yep, Delta moved me from my selected seat to another one I did not want. Thanks Delta.

This is the reason for today’s post and the critical reason you personally must, at least each Sunday, check all your booked flights to see just what Delta has inflicted on you so you can take action before the system auto updates you or moves you somewhere you don’t want to be. That is if you care where you are sitting and whom you may or may not still be sitting next to. 😉

The really madding part about all of this is Delta does not seem to care about this MAJOR issue and frustration. They clearly are not going to take the steps to alert us when they bump us out of our carefully selected seats. Really you should be happy when you get any notice that your flights have changed come to think about it. But the sad part is there was a super simple way to be alerted, in a reasonable time frame, when you got moved. AwardWallet.com in the past was able to tell you Delta has moved you as your reservation now is in a different seat than it was the day before.

Folks if a third party site can simply alert you to a seat change why can’t Delta? Maddening!

But that is why, with so many things Delta and IT, it is up to us to be proactive and check and check often. Even on the day of or the day before flight equipment swaps can happen and all of a sudden you are no longer sitting where you thought you were.

Right now I know of no way, for free that is, that you can get real alerts. You can as of this date and this post use Expert Flyer for $99 / year and set alerts for both aircraft changes as well as an alert if  YOUR SPECIFIC SEAT  you are already in opens up and then use that as an alert that you have been moved. I just hate that I would have to pay and go to all that effort when Delta should tell me this to begin with. But it is now happening so often I may have to take the jump and use Expert Flyer’s service after all.

You tell me – what do you do to make sure Delta does not move you from where you want to be? – René