We recently took a flight to Dallas to visit family. We were booked on a Friday morning (9:10am) flight and we decided that we wanted to try and leave the night before. There are two types of change fees involved, well, maybe there are more but two that I know of. One, you can change for $150/ticket and there aren't any time restrictions on when you can make this change. The other, you can change for $50/ticket (which used to be free and is also know as "standby") and you have to do that within 24 hours of your flight. Ugh! But wait, it gets worse.
So this is what we knew for the week of the flight. We're actively watching the seat planner on the web looking for available seats. There were ~15 seats available and 2 of which were non-middle seats. Psyched! Thursday @ 9:10 am comes (24 hours before our scheduled flight), we call the airline to find out that there are no seats available for our class of service. WHAT!? "So, why do I see 15 seats available on the seat planner? [I said] Oh, that just shows you the seats that haven't been booked but that still wouldn't tell you the class of service." Finally I asked, "Isn't coach the class of service we're referring to? No, the class of service is assigned when you purchase the ticket and has to do with the revenue. Your seats are a 'V' class." Huh?
Without getting into the whole exchange we had with the airline, the moral of the story is that depending on the airline (not sure if this just Continental), looking at the seat planner to get an idea of how many seats are available on a given flight is not the whole story. You have to call to get the most accurate information. We ended up taking a flight earlier than ours (6:45AM) and had to pay $50/ticket to modify the ticket - which kills me because it wasn't that long ago that you could do standby for free.
