I was wondering if anyone has any insight on potential domestic flight cancellations in the coming weeks. I do not fly very often at all and would appreciate any tips or pointers on my situation. At the beginning of the year, I booked a flight to Orlando where a cheer competition that my kid was scheduled to be held. The event was cancelled due to the coronavirus epidemic.
I had booked the flight on American Airlines (AA) purchasing basic economy tickets which was the best price I could get at the time. With basic economy, AA does not ordinarily allow for any changes to be made to flight arrangements but I have called them already and they indicated that given the circumstances with the epidemic they are allowing for tickets to be cancelled and issuing a credit (no refunds) for another flight that must be scheduled within 1 year of when the tickets were purchased. Ideally, I’d like to hold out on changing the reservation if there’s any chance I could get a refund.
Our flight was scheduled to depart on April 30th and I have been waiting to see if ultimately the flight might be cancelled in which case my understanding is the airline has to then has to issue a refund. I did find a flight cancellation/delay tracking website
https://flightaware.com/live/cancelled/ which shows, for example, that today 32% of all flights to Orlando were cancelled.
I did also get an email notice from AA today indicating that my flight information has changed. It still departs on the same day, but the flight will now leave 1 hour and 19 minutes later than it was originally scheduled to and will arrive 1 hour and 16 minutes later than it was originally scheduled to. Is that significant enough of a change to warrant a refund? If anyone has any insight or guidance on this situation I’d appreciate it.
Thanks.