Why do flights get cancelled so far in advance?

[AstroBBoy]

Sorry if this has been covered before, but I'd be interested in an article/podcast episode explaining why flights get cancelled so far in advance.

Let's take a reward flight trip I had planned for FEBRUARY 2024:

30 March 2023 : Original Booking
22 May 2023 : Email from Qantas stating 2x of the 9x flights have been cancelled "... and there are no other Qantas services at this time".

Note that the cancelled flights were actually on Royal Jordanian.
So these two flights were cancelled 9 months in advance.

I ended up cancelling the whole thing and booked a different trip (fingers crossed)
It makes booking RTW itineraries overly stressful especially when you start to add in hotels, experiences etc.

 

[jpp42]

Lots of reasons. Airlines review their schedules regularly and make new decisions about where and when they can make the most money. External factors come to play - deliveries of new aircraft may be delayed (a big issue for B787's in the past year), political situations could cause route changes, like the inability to fly over Russia, price of fuel might change and make routes less profitable then the airline had planned, etc.

It is one of the big risks of big reward itineraries like OWA - in the future if this happens you can try using the reward escalations email, but for best results you'd need to first research other alternative flights that you'd like to be booked on. Members here may be able to help, or there is a paid service from an associated company to AFF that I used for my OWA - they were also knowledgeable about which airlines were more likely to change schedules and gave good advice about what to do when this happens.