that is based upon perspective. As someone with almost 2M miles across AA and UAL, the move to early cancellation was a real PITA. In the old days they tried and most times you eventually got home. Then they moved to the "oh, this looks bad, lets cancel all the flights" approach. Works well for them, but for the guy trying to get home it is all bad. This was done after they started booking up flights upward of 90%, so if they cancelled all of Fridays flights and if you didn't see it coming and made provisional alternate reservations, they offered you a new flight on Monday afternoon. When you cancel 5 flights with 200 passengers per and all flights are booked 90%, there is just nowhere to put them. I cant tell you how many times I had to drive home 12-16 hours due to this policy. Early cancellations benefit the airlines, NOT the flying public. THis was especially problematic with snow storms. It was just easier and cheaper for them to cancel the whole day and who really cared that no one could get anywhere. Some of this is on the Gov't for publishing "on time" statistics. Just more incentive to cancel flights vs taking the ding for being late. I remember 15 years ago, UAL wanted better stats, so added 45 minutes to the arrival time on every flight. However, they didnt account for gate availability. Every time the flight was on time, you sat in the penalty box for 30 minutes. Again, no issue for UAL as in their mind, the customer was happy due to arriving "on time."