>In the end the only thing which worked was to book an identical itinerary, same day of the week and times, just one week early
My own booking problem and later "hack" is as follows: I think one mistake I made was to book my connecting flight (wiht another airline) within a few hours of my arrival time. In this kind of scenario, if airline A or B changes the flight time or cancels, then it messes up my flight with the other airline. Which means, in Covid times, it seems best to stay a day or two in the layover city rather than try to make everything line up before any flights have taken place.
>implying that the only "real" flight out only runs once a week
To try to figure out real flight likelihood, I had to piece together ever-changing gov't regulations about who can fly where, in regards to quarantines, with how the airlines might be responding to that news in their flight scheduling. And on top of that, pretend to book flights to figure out how full they are, then continuing to do this every other day even after my flight is booked, to get a gauge on how likely cancellation is.
My own booking problem and later "hack" is as follows: I think one mistake I made was to book my connecting flight (wiht another airline) within a few hours of my arrival time. In this kind of scenario, if airline A or B changes the flight time or cancels, then it messes up my flight with the other airline. Which means, in Covid times, it seems best to stay a day or two in the layover city rather than try to make everything line up before any flights have taken place.
>implying that the only "real" flight out only runs once a week
To try to figure out real flight likelihood, I had to piece together ever-changing gov't regulations about who can fly where, in regards to quarantines, with how the airlines might be responding to that news in their flight scheduling. And on top of that, pretend to book flights to figure out how full they are, then continuing to do this every other day even after my flight is booked, to get a gauge on how likely cancellation is.