Confirm your reservations?

Absolutely. Not only will that give you a bit of advanced warning if something has gone wrong "Nope, sorry Ms. Smith, you never made a reservation with us", but it helps the hotel ownership/B&B folks know that you really are coming. I prefer using email, so it costs me nothing and I have the peace of mind that they know I am coming and should something go wrong, I have a printed piece of paper that shows what was discussed.

Also I definitely check my air reservations often, as well as right before I leave. Airlines are making mistakes left and right, and it can be extremely expensive to fix even if you aren't the one who made the mistake. A perfect example is my recent experience with NWA. They moved our flight home to earlier in the day. Trouble is, our connecting flight to that flight landed after the flight home. NWA, KLM, and Vayama who sold me the ticket didn't catch the error, I did. Under advice from one of our Helpline regulars, I called NWA's reservations center and the agent rebooked me on a better flight home that actually saves us money! (Now we do not have to buy train tickets to return to Rome where we were flying RT.)

If I hadn't caught the error, or if I had waited til the last moment to look, we could have been in real trouble if the alternate flights were full, etc.

Bottom line: confirm everything.

Definitely confirm your hotel reservations, and as stated above use e-mail. We printed off our confirmations that had both the dates and costs included just in case we had problems. No issues, but we had them just in case.

Happy travels!

Thanks for the encouragement to check on my reservations. I went ahead and also decided to check on my flight as you suggested. Well...it has changed and I now have two new flights! I actually leave three hours earlier! United said they have cut lots of flights so they had to move our flights around. So, we leave three hours earlier and we have an additional leg of our trip home (I'm not too happy since I chose these flights for a reason..oh well!) Good thing I know ahead of time. We have friends taking us to the airport in 6 days. Our pick up time is different also.

Thanks so much for the responses..glad I followed through with your suggestions!

Especially if you book your air travel more than three months in advance absolutely check your flight times. Most airlines make major schedule changes approximately quarterly (nearly all the time it is time changes, NOT flight eliminations or changes, typically unless you book way out you won't be able to be a flight that's being cut) and especially if the aircraft type changes (say from one type of 777 to another, which have slightly different seating layouts) you may lose your assigned seats...

I always reconfirm my hotel/B&B reservations a week or two before I leave. Before my trip to Scotland this summer, I discovered one of the B&Bs had lost my reservation. They offered me the opportunity to stay with them, but in a different room each night or they found a B&B close by where I could stay in the same room the whole time. Both choices seemed fine to me and I elected to stay with them. I was happy to get it resolved before I got there. That's the only time I've ever had an issue, but you never know. Why take a chance.

I am leaving for a three week trip to France tomorrow and here is my experience with reconfirming reservations.

We had a total of eight reservations made five months in advance. We tried to reconfirm two weeks ahead of time. Five out of the eight reconfirmed with no problem. One said they had no room as if we had never made a reservation. After repeated attempts to explain the situation we got no response so we rebooked with another B & B. Two out of the eight never responded at all after 3 or 4 attempts. We did not rebook these but will call them after we get to France and will find another place if necessary. I printed all of our confirmations so I hope that will help with the two B & B's that did not respond.

Our flight was also changed which gave us such a short layover we decided to just pack a carry-on in case our luggage did not make the flight.

My advice is to try to reconfirm at least two weeks in advance in case you are scrambling trying to make new reservations at the last minute. Phoning might be even better.

Wish me luck! We have tried to plan so carefully, but even the best laid plans can go awry.

On the subject of confirmation of reservations, and whether people found that they actually had reservations, I think a valid point is the language. Was this reservation in an English speaking country or was it in a non-English speaking country? Do you understand the language of the country? Maybe you never made it clear to the place of accommodation that you wanted a "confirmed" reservation.

I agree that language could have been part of the problem since I do not speak French. But I did have very clearly written firm "confirmations" for every accomodation. The problem arose when I tried to "reconfirm". Maybe it was a language thing or maybe a mistake on the part of the people taking the booking. Regardless, we make the best of it and go on.