After flying Qantas from Sydney to Dallas on Thursday, I was supposed to fly American Airlines from Dallas to Philadelphia and onward to my home airport of Albany, NY, arriving on Thursday night after 11 pm. Unfortunately, the leg from Dallas to Philadelphia was delayed, and I missed my connection to Albany. I ended up stuck in Philadelphia for the night on Thursday.

Things got a little nutty at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport yesterday. I hit this huge bottleneck trying to get to my gate.

American automatically rebooked me on the next available flight, which wasn’t until 9:40pm on Friday night — almost 24 hours later. I checked for other rebooking options, and the 9:40pm to 11:49pm flight was the only nonstop option available. I live a little over 4 hours from Philadelphia, so I wasn’t going to spend 24 hours in Philly waiting to fly home to the family. I started looking for other options while connected to free in-flight WiFi on my flight to Philadelphia.

I first booked a rental car with the intent to drive home if I couldn’t find a better option. That was easy and free to cancel; I booked it just to have that option if nothing better came along (I later cancelled).

The Bilt-Amtrak transfer bonus was on, so I next transferred a bunch of Bilt points to Amtrak (which I had planned to do speculatively, anyway). Trains were initially showing as sold out, but I know from past experience that seats often come back into inventory here and there during the 24 hours prior to departure. Proactively transferring to Amtrak made it possible for me to jump on an Amtrak booking that would have gotten me to Albany at 4:45 pm yesterday when a seat opened a little while after my transfer.

About an hour later, an Amtrak seat opened up on an itinerary that would arrive an hour earlier, at 3:45 pm. If I had booked my original Amtrak “value” fare with cash, I would have faced a 30% cancellation penalty (more than $70 in this case). Thankfully, since I booked with Amtrak points, I was able to change without a change fee (I did have to pay a few more points for the new itinerary because of a fare difference).

Then, just before I went to bed (at almost 3am Eastern), I checked the American Airlines app again for flight rebooking options. Space had opened on the 1pm nonstop from Philadelphia to Albany! I was able to rebook that connecting leg for free, arriving in Albany at 2:27pm yesterday instead of 11:49pm. Then, since my Amtrak booking was made with points instead of cash, I was able to cancel my Amtrak reservation for free. The points were immediately redeposited into my Amtrak account.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5909331&forum_id=2#50168875)