Can airlines bump customers to earlier flights against their will? Do customers have any recourse?

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I presume you are flying economy and purchased the tickets with dollars and not miles. Business or award tickets have very different rules and business award tickets have downright crazy rules whereas you can force Air Canada to make seats available as an award if there's no other way even if that flight otherwise is not bookable as an award. I did this just a few weeks ago when they moved my Vancouver-Chicago flight up a few hours so I had five minutes left to catch my Chicago - Stockholm flight. You need to call Aeroplan for this and be polite but unrelenting.

Back to revenue economy tickets: if you were notified of an itinerary change before the start of travel, you had the right to refuse the change and get a full refund. If you started flying and subsequent legs needed a change you do not have a real choice but to suck it up. Compensation kicks in once you are more than 24 hours late compared to the itinerary you started with -- and again, that's not the itinerary you booked, you can book flights many months ahead which simply change when they fly but the itin you accepted implicitly by showing up for your first flight.

Based on your comment, your time to act was five days ago and now there's extremely little to none you can do. You can file a complaint but I am not sure you have a lot of leverage here.

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