Most trip disasters are not the first thing that goes wrong. They are the second and third things, which only became problems because the first thing moved and nobody worked out what it touched.
A flight shifts three hours. The airport transfer booked for the old arrival time is now wrong. The hotel you told about a late check-in is now wrong too. The restaurant that evening may be fine or may not. None of that is unusual, and all of it is predictable if you already know which parts of your trip were built on top of which.
The three questions, per booking
Ask these once, when you book, and the answer is there when you need it at six in the morning in an airport.
- What does this depend on? A transfer usually depends on a flight. A check-in usually depends on a transfer.
- What depends on this? The same relationship read the other way, which is the one that matters during a disruption.
- If this moves by three hours, what is the first thing I check?
Only walk downward
This is the part people get wrong under pressure. When a flight moves, everything booked after it is potentially affected. Nothing booked before it is.
A hotel check-in changing does not mean your flight changed. The direction runs one way, because later things depend on earlier things and not the reverse, and remembering that halves the number of things you have to think about.
Handle them one at a time
The instinct when four things are wrong is to deal with all four at once, usually by opening four browser tabs and phoning somebody while reading an email. That is how people end up cancelling the wrong booking.
Change the thing that moved first. Write down the new fact. Then go to whatever depended on it, one booking at a time, and decide whether it actually needs anything. Often two of the four turn out to be fine.
What to have in front of you before you call anybody
4 things to do
Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.
Do not let anything change itself
Whatever you use to track this, it should never quietly rewrite your other bookings when one thing moves. Being shown what might be affected is useful. Having four bookings silently altered on your behalf is considerably worse than having none of them altered, because now you do not know what is true.